Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age. We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices.
Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age.
We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices. Wait in line at the post office or grocery store. All eyes on devices. Sit at a red light and look at the drivers in the cars around you. Same story. More disturbing still, look at the drivers on the highway going full speed. Even some of them have their eyes darting between the windshields and their smartphones.
We see it in ourselves too. Sit down to read a physical book with your phone nearby. Observe how long you can go without scrolling, texting, or checking some notification. When you’re standing in line at a coffee shop and have forty-five seconds to spare, notice how hard it is to resist the urge to pull out your phone to do something— anything—to fill that blank space. More disturbing still, monitor how much time elapses between the moment you wake in the morning until the moment you unlock your phone and start scrolling.
For many of us, it’s only a matter of seconds.
From the rising of the sun to its going down, we scroll our way through the day. We scroll our way through life. And we are scrolling ourselves to death.
The death march of our scrolling society is not just a metaphor. In many ways, the smartphone is literally killing us (and not just in distracted-driving automobile accidents). Researchers have made compelling correlations between smartphone (especially social media) usage and rising mental unhealth (depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, loneliness), especially among teens and young adults.1 Consider the staggering rise in suicide rates among US youth and young adults since the dawn of the smartphone age. Between 2001 and 2007, the suicide rate for kids ages ten to twenty-four was fairly stable, but since 2007 (the year the iPhone debuted), it has skyrocketed, rising 62 percent between 2007 and 2021.2
Technology has also helped accelerate a “loneliness epidemic” with demonstrable, wide-ranging negative effects on overall health.3
The ominous term “deaths of despair” has become part of contemporary vernacular. And after steadily climbing for most of the last century, average life expectancies in the United States have, since 2021, started to decline.
Certainly more than technology is at play in these trends. But not less. When we consider the variables that have most changed in society in the last two decades, any answer we come up with will center around digital technology. We didn’t know what “social media” was twenty-five years ago. The term smartphone was first coined in 1997. The World Wide Web is barely three decades old. Each of these things has utterly reshaped the world in the last quarter century. And things continue to move fast—so fast that we rarely pause long enough to ask questions or ponder unintended side effects. As Antón Barba-Kay put it in A Web of Our Own Making, digital technology has so vastly transformed human life over just a few decades that “there is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt.”4
Our critical faculties struggle to keep pace with the scope and speed of the digital revolution. As a result, we’re often blind to the ways we’re being transformed. If we could jump forward in time a few decades, we could see more clearly. But since we can’t do that, our best path to wisdom is often in the other direction: looking back in time, learning from bygone eras and voices. What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
One book I return to again and again is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book was prophetic when it released in 1985, and it’s even more prophetic now, four decades later.
Which Dystopia?
Just as today we look back to Postman’s book to help make sense of our cultural moment, so too did Postman look to the past from his vantage point in 1985, at the peak of what he called the “Age of Show Business.” The old books Postman looked to for insight were a pair of dystopian novels: George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Working on his book in 1984, Postman pondered: Had Orwell’s vision of that year come to fruition? Or was Huxley’s dark vision of the future more accurate?
What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
Postman concluded that Huxley’s dystopia, not Orwell’s, better predicted the shape Western society took in the latter half of the twentieth century. As he explained,
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.5
If Postman was astute in 1985 to observe the Huxleyan shape of our “trivial culture”—where opted-in distractions and diversions kept us numb and dumb—how much more accurate does his prophetic vision describe life in 2025?
When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves, he had television mostly in view as the chief purveyor of trivial information that swept us away in a “sea of irrelevance.” Forty years later, we still have TV—albeit hundreds more channels and a growing number of streaming TV platforms. But we also have YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other always-on pipelines of content, algorithmically designed to grab our attention and keep us watching and scrolling, eyes glued to screens.
“Amusing ourselves to death” is still a highly accurate descriptor of what mass media does to us. But now the dominant form it takes is scrolling. And while Postman, who died in 2003, never lived to see the way smartphones, streaming, and social media would transform the world, his wisdom and warnings ring out with potent relevance.
Just as Huxley helped Postman make sense of his world in 1985, Postman can help us make sense of ours.
Notes:
See especially Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017) and Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York: Atria Books, 2023); and Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024).
Sally C. Curtin and Matthew F. Garnett, “Suicide and Homicide Death Rates among Youth and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2001–2021,” NCHS Data Brief, no. 471, June 2023, https://www.cdc.gov.
Tatum Hunter, “Technology’s Role in the ‘Loneliness Epidemic,’ ” Washington Post, April 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20th anniversary ed. (1985; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xxi–xxii.
Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.
It's Not Whether You're Addicted but What You Can Do About It
In this podcast, Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa discuss the changing world of technology, how it competes for our attention, and how Christians should engage with something that has proven to be so addictive. They address how who we are is formed by what we give our attention to and how we should think about our capacity as humans in a world of AI and overwhelming technology.
Matt Tully
Today I’m speaking with Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa. Brett serves as a senior editor, and Ivan Mesa as editorial director for the Gospel Coalition. They co-edited the new book Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age from Crossway. Brett, Ivan, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Brett McCracken
Thanks for having us.
Ivan Mesa
Good to see you.
Matt Tully
In 1985 Neil Postman famously published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that book is pretty foundational to the book that you two served as editors on (you worked with a number of contributors on different chapters), and it even was the inspiration for the title of your books, Scrolling Ourselves to Death. So I wonder, Brett, could you summarize what Postman was saying? What was his main thesis in that book, and how did some of his ideas influence what you two are trying to do with this new book?
Brett McCracken
Neil Postman was, broadly, just a critic of media and technology, kind of one of the leading voices in that genre in the twentieth century. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman is really sounding the alarm in terms of what he was observing as some pretty significant changes in the way that we were talking to one another, the way that we were thinking, about ideas, the way discourse was happening because of changes in technology. Primarily, he had television in view, so he was basically saying we had shifted from being a print-based culture or literate culture—reading things in newspapers and talking about that—to being a TV-centric culture. And the medium of TV does certain things and prioritizes certain things, namely, entertainment—keeping people amused and hooked to their TVs by any means necessary.
Matt Tully
He was already seeing this back in the mid-eighties.
Brett McCracken
He was writing in the mid-eighties, yes. He published in 1985, so long before anything we have today—the internet, etc. or smartphones—were even a thing. So he was very prophetic at that time, in the eighties, in terms of calling out how the technologies of that time were changing the way we were communicating, the way we were thinking, the way discourse was structured. And that book has really stood the test of time and proved to be prescient and prophetic in terms of where we are today. Because if we were “amusing ourselves to death” in the eighties, how much more so are we scrolling ourselves to death today in similar ways to what he was talking about, but obviously with slightly different technologies. So we wanted to put together a book that took some of his best insights from that book forty years ago and apply that wisdom to the changing technologies of today.
Matt Tully
Ivan, I’d imagine some people could hear this and hear that his focus was on television, and it almost sounds a little quaint. We think of television as, compared to the internet and compared to the media landscape that we live in today, as just so much more tame and so much less compulsive or addicting. Do you resonate with that? Is there something just categorically different about even the nature of the issue that we’re facing today than what Postman was referring to?
Ivan Mesa
Yeah. He was speaking prophetically about something. He was sounding the alarm for the culture at large. In these kind of conversations, figures like that tend to be viewed as Puddleglums, a voice in the wilderness sounding an alarm, maybe overreacting to something.
And so in a sense, he was speaking really prophetically about something that would only get worse in the coming years. So you fast forward forty years later and of course you see that in contrast, yeah, it seems quaint, what was happening in 1985 versus what’s happening in 2025. A sea change has happened even in the last decade or two in terms of the acceleration of some of these trends that were happening over decades in Postman’s time. Now it’s every year or every few months. The pace of change is happening a lot more quickly. And so you’re just having to catch up with what’s going on to think critically about that.
Matt Tully
Do you think he understood the extent to which these new media technologies, not just television, but maybe things that would come after television, the power that they would really have? Because, again, we look at some of the newer technologies that are in our smartphones today and the way that even some of these have been gamified by companies to make them more addictive. Is that something that he predicted too? Did he have a sense that we might be heading in that kind of a direction?
Ivan Mesa
Brett might know a bit more about that, but I would say the fundamental things that have not changed is in Neil Postman’s day, you have TV, you have commercials, you have these advertisers who are paying for spots on TVs in the middle of a news broadcast. So his whole argument is saying you have here a news report, that 100,000 people have died in some sort of battlefield out there, and then you cut to a break with a commercial for jeans. And so the contrast there, again, companies are trying to make money. You are the product. Your attention is being devoted. You want to make the news entertaining to get your eyes glued to that so that you can watch the commercial. So the business model there in Postman’s day, there’s a perverse incentive. And so in similar ways, fast forward forty years later, you’re seeing the same dynamics. So I don’t know if Postman would’ve predicted the exact nature of a TikTok generation and six second videos, but I think the fundamental thing that has not changed is companies that want to use you to advertise and to make money off of you with your attention.
Brett McCracken
Just to add to that, I think central to his argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was the profit motive and the commercial structure of media. And he talked about television as the point of television is not to get people to think critically. The point of television is to gather an audience for corporations. When you have an audience gathered, you can earn more money with advertisements. So the more eyeballs that are there, the more money there is to be made. And the way that you get eyeballs is a different thing than the way you get people to think critically. So amusements and diversions and trivial things, that’s what gathers an audience. And that’s what he was bemoaning. So that aspect hasn’t changed and it’s only gotten worse, as Ivan was saying. The profit incentives are still very strong in terms of the name of the game in media is gathering an audience. It’s a more crowded atmosphere than ever before. There are more people vying for limited attention, and so the incentives to have lurid, extreme, heightened rhetoric and all these wild clickbaity things are greater incentives than ever, because the attention economy is so fiercely competitive. And so I think what he was onto in the eighties, his thesis is proving to be vindicated and correct forty years later.
Matt Tully
It’s like this arms race of vying for our attention. And you’re right, as these technologies have evolved and as just even our own consumption habits as humans have changed over time, it takes more and more strategic thinking on the part of these advertisers or companies to hold our attention and get us stuck on it. Brett, another question on this. Postman had this concept that you talk about in the book of the technopoly. And that was a really helpful way to think about the ways that these technologies change and the ways that they affect us and can lead to certain undesirable outcomes. What did he mean by technopoly, and how does that relate to this conversation?
Brett McCracken Technopoly is actually the name of another one of Postman’s most famous and influential books, and actually, I think it was the first Postman book I read before I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. And his idea with Technopoly is that the tools of technology that we initially use as tools end up using us. They become a more powerful thing in terms of we lose our agency and our power over time, and we become unable to resist their power. We don’t have the power anymore to just use them on and off, turn them off, put them in the right place. Our lives are now subservient to the technopoly, the authority of technology. And if you’re not careful with technology, he argues that always happens with technology. Something that initially starts as this practical tool that we think we’ll be able to control as we need it ends up becoming this all-consuming thing in society where you can’t live without it. We can see how that’s happening with so much of digital technology. Something like Wi-Fi. If you’re in a place without Wi-Fi, you might as well not have oxygen. We can’t live without Wi-Fi anymore. If you go somewhere and you forget your smartphone, think about the panic that you have in your mind. For ten minutes I went on an errand and I don’t have my phone! That shows you the extent to which these aren’t just optional tools anymore. They’re these all-important apparatuses that are extensions of our very being that we feel like we’ve had a appendage severed if we are separated from it. So that’s the technopoly idea.
Matt Tully
So someone could hear that and maybe their response would be, “Well, is it really that different from other technologies that we’re used to that we’ve built our lives or built our society around?” I think of electricity in our homes or running water or a car. Those don’t strike us as it being a problem to rely on those things or to even have fundamentally assumed those things being present for the operation of our lives. So maybe the question is, Is the situation actually different today when it comes to digital technologies like smartphones? Or is this really just the same thing that’s always happened with new technologies?
Brett McCracken
I would say that one difference is certain technologies are addictive. You get to a point where you have addictive behavior, in terms of you can’t not use it. So with something like electricity, I wouldn’t characterize our relationship to electricity as one of addiction. If the lights go out, that’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to go into withdrawal. Whereas with smartphones and certain digital technologies, I think you’re starting to see some like legitimate addict-like behavior being on display throughout culture. So I think that’s one thing that’s changed. There’s psychological dynamics at work with certain digital technologies that are unique among other technologies. And in fact, they were designed that way. If you look into the history of social media platforms and smartphone interfaces and whatnot, a lot of times they hired behavioral psychologists to help tweak the interfaces and the dings and the lights and the sounds so that they could be as addictive as possible. So they’re intentionally created to create addicts, and it’s connected to the profit motive, again, because the more time people spend on these platforms and the more unable they are to resist grabbing for their phone all day, every day, that is more money for these companies. That’s more advertising revenue. So there’s a lot that’s working against us in terms of our ability to resist these technologies, because there are so many incentives to make us as hooked as possible.
Matt Tully
Ivan, in one of the chapters in the book, Patrick Miller, one of the contributors, describes our phones as “digital syringes.” He likens this compulsive use of our phones to a drug addiction, and he uses that kind of language. In keeping with that metaphor, Ivan, how did we get so hooked on these devices? What’s the mechanism in our brains that’s leading to that? And to keep with that metaphor of drug addiction, what might a detox look like for us as we think about our lives as Christians?
Ivan Mesa
I picked up the iPhone a little late. I was a little late to the party. I think it might have been 2010 or 2011. And at that point, I mean it was just amazing. It’s hard to think about this in this manner, but back when we were younger, we had SMS texts and you had to click on certain buttons to get certain letters to appear on your phone.
Matt Tully
And you only had so many you could send a month. You had to pay for each message.
Ivan Mesa
Limitations.
Brett McCracken
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that.
Matt Tully
You could run up that bill real quick.
Ivan Mesa
And so in the beginning, you start seeing these new features of texting and calling and then listen to your music. And none of us are Luddites in the sense that we don’t benefit. We both have iPhones. We both are on social media. So we’re not saying here that this is all bad, but there is a point where you start seeing, like the proverbial frog in the kettle, you’re just getting warmed up over time, and then you realize you’re checking your phone every six seconds. You pick up your phone, you feel the sensation of notifications when there’s none on your phone—that that’s an actual thing.
Bret McCracken:
Ghost notifications.
Ivan Mesa
Yes, exactly.
Matt Tully
It feels like it’s buzzing in your pocket, but it didn’t.
Ivan Mesa
I feel like it’s buzzing right now, and I don’t even have it on me. So I think over time you start seeing—back to the profit motive here with companies—just the way that these are created to be addictive. And you asked about ways to detox from that. Addiction, personally, I’ve had seasons where I just take a break from all social media, take a break from different notifications. I turn that all that off. I think Cal Newport, his whole stuff on deep work, has been so helpful for me, and his book Digital Minimalism. He’s a productivity guru, and I just appreciate that so much, and he advocates for that pulling back on media. Another thing is just, personally, one thing that I do is on Sundays I just take a break from all things on my phone. And that’s just a weekly thing, where it’s not this emergency situation where you’re just over your head with social media or technology in general, and it’s a good way to just hit the reset button on a weekly basis.
Matt Tully
So you’re just not using your phone all day long? Is that how it works?
Ivan Mesa
Yeah. My job requires me to be on my phone, be present, making phone calls.
Brett McCracken
I can attest to that as his colleague at TGC. He doesn’t text or bug me. As my supervisor at TGC, it’s nice to know I’m never going to be bugged on a Sunday, because Ivan doesn’t use his phone.
Ivan Mesa
And some people just maybe should not be on social media, or have a dumb phone. And this is all a matter of prudent and wisdom. There’s not a one right way approach to doing this, but I think what we’re trying to do in this book is bring these people together to have words of wisdom for this generation that are so addicted that we are scrolling ourselves to death. And when you think about just attention, we have limited attention in our lifetime. Our lives are finite. We have a certain amount of time. And when you think about just over the course of a day, a week, a month, years, a decade, when you think of that attention being given over to some other company to make money off of you (for a company) it just puts things in perspective. And so Tony Reinke’s book on technology has been so helpful here—12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You—even non-Christians are talking about this. There’s a book called Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, and it’s just super helpful. Attention is the currency of our age, and we want, as Christians, we think our attention matters. Where are we putting the main focus of our attention? Is it ultimate things? Is it the Lord? Is it the church? Is it God’s word? Is it people? And sometimes I think some of these technologies distract us from what ultimately we should be putting our attention on.
Matt Tully
Brett, in Christian circles, it’s not uncommon to speak of the finite resources that God has given us and wanting to use those resources wisely, whether that’s our money or our time. But why attention? Why is attention distinct from just time? And why would you want to focus on that right now?
Brett McCracken
I think because attention has a spiritual formation component. Where you give your attention, it matters for how you’re being formed. What you attend to in life is what is feeding your soul. That’s what my book The Wisdom Pyramid was all about. We need to be careful about what is feeding our souls, where we are giving our attention, our limited amounts of attention. Because if you give your attention mostly to TikTok and mostly to Netflix and mostly to this kind of digital junk food out there, you are going to be formed in a certain way. But if you give your attention to the more transcendental sources of wisdom and truth, if you give your attention chiefly, of course, to God. And that’s one of the things that’s so critical for Christians in this whole conversation is what we’re really talking about here is a world where there is less and less attention being given to our creator, to God. One of the major side effects, practically, for Christian life in the digital age is that we just have less and less time in our lives to be quiet, to be still, and know that he is God, to be devotionally quiet with the Lord, with Scripture, just in prayer. I feel like we probably don’t pray much anymore because we fill all the gaps in our day which we might have used to use those opportunities to pray or just to be still and reflect with gratitude on the gifts of God. Now we just fill all those gaps with something on our phone, anything on our phone—text messages, notifications, social media. And so I think the degradation of our attention, the depletion of our attention, has huge spiritual consequences, because you are not going to have a vibrant spiritual life without that relationship with God. And any relationship, whether you’re talking about a marriage relationship or a friendship, you need time. Time is an essential ingredient. Time together is an essential ingredient to a healthy relationship. And that’s true of our spiritual relationship with God. We need time with him, and we need to give our attention to him and to listen to his word and to pray and to seek him. And that’s why in an attention economy, it’s a spiritual economy as well.
Ivan Mesa
I would also add that’s the vertical dynamic at play; there’s also the horizontal. And so my worst moments as a father is when I am on my phone and not paying attention to my kids. I care about far-flung issues and the outrage of the day on social media or what’s going on in this part of the world, and the ironic part is that I cannot affect change in some of these areas that are way above my pay grade. But when it comes to the children right in front of me—diapers to change, a book to read, a discipline conversation, like all these things—I am tempted to care more about things that I cannot change than the things that are staring me right in the face. And those are moments that I’ve had to repent. So, yes, the vertical dynamic of attention toward the Lord, but also at the horizontal level—just attention to where the Lord has placed me and called me as a father, husband, church member, as a neighbor—what are the things there in front of me that I can do by God’s grace? And I think that conversation on attention has immediate implications for our day-to-day experience.
Matt Tully
Ivan, keeping with that horizontal dimension that you just brought up, another thing that is highlighted throughout the book is just the effect of these disembodied interactions and relationships that we tend to have online, mostly in social media, but there are probably other forms of that disembodied dynamic that we experience. Ivan, how would you describe the effect that the very common experience that we have of doing a FaceTime call with somebody, or even worse, just sending someone messages online without ever even seeing the person, how does that affect us and how we think about each other, for both other Christians and other believers but even non-Christians? How would you boil that down?
Ivan Mesa
All these tools are great. With my parents and our children seeing their grandfather, it is great to FaceTime when you are separated by distance. So I think these technologies are great in insofar as it allows you to see people that you wouldn’t see otherwise. I have coworkers at TGC that I get to text with, Zoom with, be on the phone with. With my children, for seeing their grandfather, it’s great to FaceTime. So those are all good things. At the same time, these technologies can give you an illusion of intimacy when it’s not there. So much of our day-to-day experience with friendships with people that we know, like neighbors, there are things that can happen only when you see someone face to face. And so sometimes, like I was just saying earlier, you can be tempted to think these digital friendships, these connections you have, are the most important things in your life when they’re not. Those are good to have, those are blessings, you wanna steward them well. But at times they can pull you away from the embodied relationships that we were created for by the Lord himself. So I think it is just growing in the awareness of that and allowing you to be focused in on what the Lord has called you to right there in front of you.
Matt Tully
Brett, let’s talk about another big issue, a very hot-button issue in the digital world today. That would have to be AI, artificial intelligence. It’s one of these things that over the last couple of years has just been thrust into the forefront of the public consciousness in a way that maybe wasn’t the case before. Obviously, there have been especially filmmakers thinking about AI and the effect of AI on our culture on society for many, many decades. But it’s only recently that we’ve begun to see the fulfillment of some of these fantasies actually coming to fruition right in front of us. And I think it’s been a shocking but also exciting, exhilarating, confusing kind of thing for many Christians. And I think in particular for Christians, we can sometimes have a little bit of a sense of unease, because we have a certain view of humanity and what it means to be a human. We have a view of life and what the good life is in God’s economy. But we also don’t know of any Bible verses that talk about AI. And maybe it feels like very few even come close to addressing something as novel as artificial intelligence. So help us start to think about that. What would be some basic principles that Christians should hold onto when it comes to trying to engage this AI conversation?
Brett McCracken
This is the new frontier of technology. I think we’re just beginning the discourse and the critical evaluation of AI, and I think in another decade it’ll be interesting to see how the conversation shifts and how culture is changed. I think it’s probably going to be the next internet in terms of think about how radically our world has been reshaped in the last thirty years by the internet. That’s what AI is going to do for every aspect of society and culture. So it’s definitely good for Christians to start thinking about it. To go back to Postman and just this whole conversation about how every technology is not innocuous and neutral. There are things that it allows us to do that we couldn’t do before that are maybe good and helpful, and there are ways that it changes things in perhaps negative ways that we need to be alert to and on guard to. So obviously with AI we can already see some very helpful, practical ways that it can help, just with efficiency in every industry. Even as a writer, sometimes I’m writing an email now, and the AI finishes my sentence and I’m like, That’s actually what I was going to say. Thank you for saving me two seconds. And that sort of thing is happening in every industry, the way that AI can kind of supplement in an administrative assistance sort of way. And that’s helpful. At the same time, I think we have to start asking questions about where is the line in terms of what we’re going to be okay with robots and AI replacing in terms of human capacities? When it starts getting into mimicking human creativity—like, I’m a writer, and I’m a little disturbed by how good AI writing already is, and we’re in kind of the dial-up era of AI technology. It’s a very rudimentary.
Matt Tully
Yeah. We’re still just at the very beginning.
Brett McCracken
We’re still at the beginning. So if it’s this good already, we’re going to have a William Faulkner AI soon and a Shakespeare in terms of quality of writing.
Matt Tully
I just actually saw some talking about Shakespeare and poetry. I just saw some study that was done recently where they actually showed different, I think to college students, different poetry samples, and they didn’t tell them where they were from. And consistently, the AI-generated poetry scored better among these students than the actual real poetry by a human.
Brett McCracken
That’s disturbing. So that’s the sort of thing that I think we have to think about carefully. What is it going to mean for culture when some of the most beautiful written, visually created things are no longer the product of humans? How do we then think about our capacity as humans who have the image of a Creator God? We are creators by our nature, but AI doesn’t bear the image of God, and yet they are creating in a way that kind of glorifies a Creator God. And so it’s just weird to think about that, and I think there’s a lot of theological questions that we’re going to have to wrestle with when it comes to anthropology and the nature of humanity and the image of God. And precisely how does AI mimic certain human capacities that we used to think were the unique domain of humans? One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently that I find problematic about AI has to do with the instancy of results with AI. Like on ChatGPT, you can ask a fairly complex question, and you get an instant, fairly good in-depth answer. You can give it a prompt, like compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven about this theme. And in like in five seconds it will produce something. There’s something obviously really cool about that in a shiny-new-object-toy sort of sense, but there’s something disturbing about that, because patience and time and creation is part of the joy of it. As a writer and as a creator myself, the way that I glorify God as a writer—or as a painter glorifies God, if you’re a Christian painter, or whatever your vocation—is not just the result; it’s the process. It’s the painstaking work and consideration and attention. To go back to the precious value of our attention, when you attend to your task, it takes time. So it demeans that when you can snap your fingers in two seconds and AI produces something that would take you a year to produce.
Matt Tully
It seems to cheapen it in some way.
Brett McCracken
It cheapens it. And so I think that that’s a question that we’re going to have to wrestle with is just the cheapening of content and ideas and art and culture. I could go on with that because this is, as someone who cares about the arts and beauty, this is pretty concerning to me, but that’s a conversation probably for another day. But there’s a lot that we need to be thinking about with AI.
Matt Tully
Ivan, when it comes to AI and the future, as Brett said, there’s a good chance, probably very likely, that we are still just in the very early stages and that there are developments to come and applications to come that we’ve maybe not even imagined yet. Would you say you’re more on the optimistic side about all the good that it’s going to do, that on balance it’s going to be a really positive development? Or would you be more pessimistic about the effects of AI on our culture?
Ivan Mesa
I’m naturally pessimistic, as Brett knows, and so even hearing debates with Elon Musk and OpenAI controversy, I tend to be more on the Elon Musk side of I think this presents potentially an existential threat to humanity. But take it with a grain of salt. I’m naturally a Puddleglum. But I think on the whole, my contrarian take on AI stuff at times is not building new stuff per se; it’s building off a pool of data that humanity has created. So, yes, in some ways it’s new content—derivations of what we’ve created—but it’s based on what humanity has created.
Matt Tully
So it’s fundamentally not possible of being original, truly original.
Ivan Mesa
Yeah, I think so.
Brett McCracken
Just to push back on that, though, because I’ve thought about that. Every human created work of art is the same thing. Every human creation is building off of what has come before. And every artist will say so. The most original musician who created the most original sounding music came from the influences that they heard growing up with music. The Beatles were not wholly original. Elvis was not wholly original. He was building on all these influences of music. So that’s what human creation already is. It’s a remixing of existing raw materials of culture. So it isn’t clear to me how what AI is doing is all that different from what humans actually do as artists.
Ivan Mesa
And we’re still in the beginning of this conversation. So I think while this book is not specifically on AI, we might need a book ten years from now called AI’ing ourselves to death. We just need more wisdom.
Brett McCracken
Just five years from now.
Ivan Mesa
Yeah, the acceleration of change and the pace here is just so quickly happening that Christians tend to be a few steps behind the culture and new technologies. And so we’re just trying to catch up with where the culture is at right now and bring the best thinkers, the ethicists, to really wrestle with this. And so I think this conversation is, in microcosm, what a lot of Christians are discussing and debating about—the role of AI within art, creating, even spiritual wisdom. That’s a whole different category, but AI cannot create wisdom. It can create content, but there are certain things about the church, about God’s word, about the Christian experience, the Holy Spirit in dwelling believers that AI cannot replicate. And we’re just going to have to wrestle through a lot of those things in the future.
Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love about this book and what you guys are doing is assembling this team of thinkers to help us process this. As you said, things are changing so quickly. It can feel so hard to keep up, as a normal Christian. I think of people listening right now. Maybe it’s a pastor who’s just working away on his sermon every week, or there’s a stay-at-home mom who’s just enmeshed in the life of diapers and lunches and taking kids to different events, and it can be really hard to keep up with the constant stream of developments that we read about. And so having a resource like this book just helps to distill some of that down and help us to think very carefully along with others who have spent more time than we can spend on some of these things. Another quick question. Digital platforms, in general, whether it’s a streaming video or podcasts or social media sites, they have been such a powerful vehicle for ministry over the past twenty years or so. And there’s probably no better example of that than the organization that you two work for, the Gospel Coalition, which arguably wouldn’t really be what it is today without the advent of the internet and digital technologies and digital content that we all can get on our phone anytime we want. How should we think about this as individual Christians, as people in leadership in a local church, or even as Christian organizations, just balancing the incredible ministry potential of these tools versus the dangers and the pitfalls that can also come with these tools? Brett, let’s start with you.
Brett McCracken
This is a question that I’ve thought about and wrestled with a lot, because I tend to be a techno-skeptical borderline Luddite when it comes to these things, and yet I work for an online digital ministry known as the Gospel Coalition. And so even in my own vocation, I sometimes wrestle with this question of am I just adding to the problem, or am I just contributing to the glut of content that people are just consuming and scrolling through on their phones? And what I say and where I’ve come to is just this idea that technology can be redeemed. Even technologies which in the sum total are probably a net negative for culture, there are still ways that they can be deployed for redemptive ends. And that you see that with almost any technology in history. And so I think the key for Christians is first to go slow when it comes to adopting and deploying technologies, to not just rush and whatever new technology comes along, you’re just like instantly, “How can we use this for our ministry and our mission?” But you just think carefully about it and consider the costs and consider not only the things that it affords for you to do but also the things that it changes for the worse. So go slow in how you do it, but also be hopeful that the Holy Spirit can use even deeply broken platforms and compromised spaces like the internet. And of course, if you think more broadly about Christian mission throughout time, it’s always been true that Christians don’t shy away from the places in the world geographically that are hostile or dangerous or disease ridden. You still go there as Christians, because you have to bring the gospel there. You have to bring the redemption of Jesus to these lost spaces. And so we might look at the internet like we look at Ebola-stricken West Africa. Christians still go there. Christians are still present. We are faithfully present in the spaces of the internet and social media, because we believe that there are people dying. There’s a spiritual sickness that is endemic on the internet, and if we’re not there, if Christians aren’t there, if for our own piety and the purity of our spiritual lives we run for the analog hills, so to speak, and live offline, then we’re just abandoning this space. We’re abandoning these people that we really believe are being malformed in powerful ways. And so I view what we do at the Gospel Coalition as trying to be a light in the darkness, bringing health to a generally unhealthy space. And hopefully, if people are scrolling through their devices anyway and maybe consuming a lot of junk food, they come across some healthy items from places like the Gospel Coalition and many other Christians who are providing healthy things online.
Ivan Mesa
That’s a great missionary perspective. I would also add a discipleship component here. The reality is Christians are going to be engaged online. They’re going to be on platforms. They’re going to be on social media accounts. Some may not, and that’s fine, but we want to create a culture in which we use and leverage these tools to get people back in their context in their churches, in their small groups. We want to use content online to help encourage Christians to be faithful in their lives. So the end goal was never to create content so that they can live on that content. We create and leverage the content to turn around and say, “This is how you be a faithful husband, as a church member, as a faithful member serving the needs in your community.” So we want to create content in that way to basically be faithful to God’s word so the church can be the church. That’s really our goal at the end of the day.
Brett McCracken
We often talk at the Gospel Coalition internally about how we never want to be a replacement for the local church. Nothing on your phone can ever be a replacement for the local church. So if you pay attention to our output in terms of our resources, they’re mostly actually sending people to offline realities, whether it’s the local church or Christian community or their families or various things. So I think that’s one redemptive use of technology is to remind people of the health and the beauty and the wonder of the physical world that God created.
Matt Tully
So maybe that’s the main application after someone finishes listening to this conversation is put your phone down, stop listening to podcasts for a little while, and go do something outside.
Matt Tully
Maybe a couple of lightning round questions for you both. I’d love to hear both of your answers to each of these. If you had to delete all of your social media apps on your phone, Ivan, except for one, which one would you keep and why?
Ivan Mesa
Well, I have none on my phone right now. So I’m living my best Neil Postman life. I would say I think X, formerly Twitter, would probably be it. I like a text-based app with words mostly. I know it has other things, but the short-form conversations, little chatter conversations and updates, I enjoy that.
Matt Tully
But you’ve chosen not to have that on your phone?
Ivan Mesa
Nope.
Matt Tully
Is that just because you didn’t find it helpful? Was it becoming too all consuming for you? What was behind that decision?
Ivan Mesa
I’m an editor of a book called Scrolling Ourselves to Death, so I think I would be living hypocritically if I was just endlessly notified, scrolling everything. I mentioned Cal Newport earlier. I’ve been so helped by Cal Newport in terms of just productivity, and If I’m trying to be faithful in my calling and my nine to five job at TGC, as a husband, as a church member, creating curriculum for teaching on a Sunday morning, if I am continually bombarded by this platform and that platform, it would just make my life really difficult to be faithful in all those areas. So it’s one practical way that I just try to be faithfully present in what the Lord has called me to in my life.
Matt Tully
Brett, how about you? If you had to delete all of them except for one, what would you keep?
Ivan Mesa
Instagram.
Brett McCracken
Yeah, you’re right. I probably would keep Instagram, and it’s because I think as much as there’s lots of problems with Instagram, I actually like seeing photos of my friends and family who live in other places of the world and just getting little glimpses of their lives and their kids. As a parent of three cute little kids, I’m biased, but I think they’re really cute. There’s something that’s not terrible about our impulse to want to share photos of children. Children are gifts from God, and they’re precious, and it blesses people. I know it blesses my parents, who live far away from me, to see photos of them. And I like to text people directly more photos than I post publicly on Instagram, but it’s still a way that you can keep in touch with people. And I find it to be a generally more edifying social media platform than some of the other ones.
Matt Tully
Brett, my next question for you: Do you use ChatGPT? And if so, how do you use it?
Brett McCracken
No, I don’t use it. So that’s my answer. I’ve played with it here and there, but yeah ’m a little bit just scared, honestly, about the potential, as a creative, connecting to what I was saying earlier about just creativity and the threat that AI poses.
Matt Tully
Are you scared that it would sap you of your creativity? Like you would become too dependent on it, or something else?
Brett McCracken
No, I can’t see myself ever relying on it for my own process, but just something about it weirds me out in terms of that idea that a complex question or a fairly complex human prompt that I take years to process and think through can be so rapidly mimicked in a decent way. So just for my own mental health, I’ve avoided even being aware of those potentials.
Matt Tully
How about you, Ivan?
Ivan Mesa
I taught a Sunday school, and I created an outline for a passage. I think it was 1 Samuel 18 or 19. I love alliteration, and I could not find the one word that had alliteration with the two other points. I put it in ChatGPT, and it gave me the right word. I forget the outline now.
Brett McCracken
That’s a practical usage of ChatGPT.
Ivan Mesa
Desperation, deception, deliverance. I had my three points for my class.
Matt Tully
You just needed one more D word.
Ivan Mesa
Exactly. It was like every word was "de," and ChatGPT gave me the one word that I was missing. One other time I helped my wife. She has a business that she runs, and it was a complex mathematical formulation for a product—how much it cost her to buy that product, how much she was selling it for, what she needs to sell it for to make a margin. So I just put that in ChatGPT, and it gave me the correct answer. And you can probably Google that maybe, but ChatGPT just took all that information and gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.
Matt Tully
My favorite use case for ChatGPT relates to Excel formulas, where you can go in and, in natural human language, explain what I’m trying to do, and it will create this complex formula that almost always works perfectly. It is amazing. Those are examples, I think, of augmenting things that we’re doing, simplifying things that we’re trying to do, without really replacing us in the driver’s seat of that role.
Brett McCracken
Yeah, I think the way that AI augments search has already proven to be helpful for me. Now, when you Google a question, it gives you that AI summary at the top, and I find that to be helpful a lot of times. Recently, I’ve been Googling things like “best examples of revisionist westerns,” because I’m teaching this faith in film cohort with TGC, and I’m doing genre studies on different genres. And the AI summaries have been really helpful, and it’s reminded me of, Oh, I didn’t remember that film, and I didn’t remember that one. And so I think as an augmenting tool to the natural algorithms of search, it’s super helpful.
Matt Tully
Maybe a final question. And Ivan, you’ve already given us a little glimpse into something that you do along these lines, but maybe there’s something else that you’d mentioned. What’s one screen-free habit that’s had the biggest impact on your own spiritual life, your own family life, and your own church’s life, as you think about being intentional with these technologies?
Ivan Mesa
Oh, that’s an easy answer. I think books in general. I cannot summarize and tell the story of my conversion apart from books. I cannot tell the story of my discipleship and growth in Christ apart from books. I’m an editor of books. I work for an organization, the Gospel coalition, that produces books. I work with Crossway as well. I did this book. So I think books in general have been kind of my secret sauce to work against and mitigate against the onslaught of social media and technology. It’s sit down with a book that’s not beeping at me, notifying me of emails and crises and a text message. So I think the book itself, the artifact of beginning a book, seeing the argument from beginning to end, chapter to chapter, page to page, has helped me in this age of social media, technology, and AI to just focus in on those things that matter most. So whether it’s Christian books or even non-Christian books, in terms of common grace and benefiting from a good book of fiction or poetry, those have all been a means of grace that the Lord has used to help me to be a better human and a more faithful Christian.
Matt Tully
That’s helpful. Brett, how about you?
Brett McCracken
I would say two (I think maybe that’s cheating): the church and nature. And if you’ve read The Wisdom Pyramid, you know that those are two of the prominent, foundational things that I advocate. But in terms of a non-screen moment of my week that I look forward to, it’s going to church and being in the embodied presence of the saints and singing in an embodied way and hearing actual voices, and shaking hands in a physical way. And all of that is just so recalibrating for me, because I spend so much of my week working on a device for the digital ministry of the Gospel Coalition.
Matt Tully
Would you then advocate for or do you tend to bring a physical Bible with you so you don’t have to be looking at your phone?
Brett McCracken
Yes. As often as I can remember to bring my physical Bible, I do. Sometimes I forget, and I have to use the ESV app for my Bible reading. So the church and then nature. Living in Southern California helps, because it’s nice all year round, but going on walks in the middle of my day has been really helpful for me just to have screen-free time to process. I’m a big believer in the importance of space to think, which is an increasingly rare thing in a hyper-productive, optimize-every-moment mode of living that technology allows us to do. But when you try to optimize every moment—every five minutes, every sixty seconds of gaps in your day—you end up having no space to think and to critically connect dots and make connections of what’s happened in your life in the recent history. So going on solo walks in my neighborhood or family walks with my kids has been so helpful just to not only have that space to think and to reflect but also just to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation in a way that cultivates gratitude and worship.
Matt Tully
Ivan and Brett, thank you so much for taking some time today to help us think through these complex issues. But they’re ever present. They’re all around us, and we can’t really escape some of the challenges that we discussed today. And I think this book in particular is going to be such a helpful resource for so many Christians as we try to be faithful in the midst of an increasingly tricky world to navigate on these fronts.
Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.
Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
Every doctor knows that healing begins with careful listening. Without truly hearing a patient, there can be no accurate diagnosis, and without a diagnosis, there can be no effective remedy.
You look at the calendar and begin counting down the days to Easter—not with anticipation, but with angst. What should be a grateful celebration of the greatest event in history, Christ’s resurrection, is instead a time of stress as you think about getting together again with troublesome friends or family members.
Writing for Psychology Today, Joe Navarro, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI and member of the National Security Division’s elite Behavioral Analysis Program, notes the unavoidable presence at many family holiday gatherings of “socially toxic individuals” who “don’t care whom they inconvenience, irritate, or hurt. They are not mindful of others. If their disruptions ruin a long-awaited, carefully planned family reunion, in their eyes, so be it—and it is never their fault.”1
So, what’s a Christian to do? When we’re tempted to fire back, to finally put Uncle Louie in his place with a perfectly timed zinger? We must remember that Jesus came to redeem people like Louie—and like us: wounded, wandering, and more desperate for grace than we realize. That’s why I want to suggest a different path: peacemaking. It’s harder and often less satisfying in the moment. But in the long run, it just might soften hearts, open doors, and make room for the gospel to take root.
The first step is to recognize others as made in the image of God. In today’s polarized culture, this can be surprisingly difficult. We’re constantly encouraged to reduce people to categories—to sort them by political affiliation, ideology, or social identity. Once labeled, those on the “other side” are no longer merely mistaken, but we view them as morally corrupt or even dangerous. Sometimes the conflict isn’t ideological but deeply personal—rooted in personality clashes, old wounds, or unresolved family tension. Whatever the source, these divisions can feel insurmountable.
The cost of such reduction is not just social—it’s deeply personal. It warps the way we see those closest to us, especially high-maintenance relatives who, if we’re honest, know how to get under our skin. But they are not opponents. They are beloved image-bearers—men and women for whom Christ died. As John Stackhouse insightfully puts it in Humble Apologetics, learning to see others through the eyes of God reshapes everything:
. . . we should sound like we really do respect the intelligence and spiritual interest and moral integrity of our neighbors. We should act as if we do see the very image of God in them. . . . It is a voice that speaks authentically out of Christian convictions about our own very real limitations and our neighbor’s very real dignity, not cynical expediency.2
In addition to seeing who they are, we must learn to recognize how their hearts ache. This means listening—not just for facts but for patterns. For underlying wounds. For quiet regrets. We listen to discern the particular malady to which the good news of Jesus can speak healing. But make no mistake: listening well is no small task. It requires intention, patience, and focus. A story from medical history illustrates the point.
Where Healing Begins
In the early 1800s, French physician René Laennec was examining a young woman suspected of having heart disease. Because of her considerable size, he couldn’t hear her heartbeat using the standard method of the day—placing his ear directly to her chest. Then, he recalled a principle from acoustics: sound travels well through hollow cylinders. Acting on a hunch, he rolled a piece of paper into a tube, placed one end on the patient’s chest, and listened through the other side. For the first time, he could easily hear the rhythm of her heart. The stethoscope was born.
Every doctor knows that healing begins with careful listening. Without truly hearing a patient, there can be no accurate diagnosis, and without a diagnosis, there can be no effective remedy. Jesus, the great physician, demonstrated this same attentiveness. When he looked upon the crowds, harassed and helpless, he didn’t rush past their pain. He saw them. He listened with his heart. And out of that attentiveness came compassion.
There’s a lesson in this for us. Healing begins with presence—and presence begins with listening.
Healing begins with presence—and presence begins with listening.
As you would expect, Jesus was an expert at identifying such cues. Whether it was at a well in Samaria or around those hated tax collectors (including the little one who climbed the tree), human hearts lay open before Christ’s compassionate gaze. For instance, Matthew says of Jesus:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9:36–38)
Notice the order. Jesus was moved to compassion when he saw the crowds. Such compassion was instigated by a particular observation: “they were harassed and helpless.” First Peter 3:15 reminds us of the importance of paying attention, “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” Listening, coupled with a readiness to share the hope we have in Christ, is powerful and attractive.
This resurrection Sunday, let’s resolve to view our relatives not as ideological opponents to be outwitted, or irritating people to be merely tolerated; instead, let’s view them with the eyes of Christ. In other words, let’s be peacemakers—ready to notice and attentively listen, embodying the one who came not to win arguments but to save sinners—even the ones seated across the table.
Notes:
Joe Navarro, "Ten Ways to Keep Family Members From Ruining Your Holidays," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spycatcher/201411/ten-ways-to-keep-family-members-from-ruining-your-holidays.
John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 134.
Chris Castaldo (PhD, London School of Theology) is the lead pastor at New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Talking with Catholics about the Gospel and coauthor of The Unfinished Reformation.
That there is such a thing as Holy Saturday in the gospel is remarkable, if oft overlooked. Why wouldn’t a simple movement from death one day to resurrection the next be sufficient?
Hope sometimes doesn’t feel like power; it feels like foolishness. High hopes can lead to horrible hopelessness. The Bible has something to say about that feeling.
I’ve heard it said, “God will accept me because I know I’m a good person.” Our culture loves to celebrate that humans are basically good, not sinful. If a human does something that’s harmful, then it must be because of a complex of sociological factors that negatively affected that person. Our culture just despises the idea of sin, of breaking moral rules from God, and if there is a God, you can earn his approval by living well.
Here’s an example. Michael Bloomberg is one of the richest people in the world. He was mayor of New York City for three terms, from 2002 to 2013. Four months after he finished his terms as governor, The New York Times published a story about him. The story says that if Bloomberg senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a judgment day. Bloomberg thinks he has earned God’s favor on the basis of his work on gun safety, obesity, and smoking cessation.
And he said, with a grin, “I’m telling you, if there is a God, when I get to heaven, I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I’m heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.” That’s a tragedy. How many people today think like that? How many people think they can earn God’s approval by how they live? The truth is that you’re not good. You are bad.
The Bible says, “None is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together, they have become worthless. No one does good. Not even one.” That’s Romans 3:10–12. So if people aren’t bad, then the good news isn’t good. The good news is only as good as the bad news is bad. And the bad news is really bad. Namely, we deserve God’s wrath because we have rebelled against our Creator.
Andrew David Naselli (PhD, Bob Jones University; PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is professor of systematic theology and New Testament at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis. He is planting Christ the King Church in Stillwater, Minnesota.
“The Bible is God’s love letter to us.” I can see where that’s coming from. It’s not a hundred percent wrong. It’s just that it’s probably not a big enough statement about what the Bible is.
I’m a parent of three young children (ages 6, 4, and 3) who are growing up in an age of ubiquitous screens. Like most parents in today’s world, I worry about how they’re being shaped by today’s technologies. Here are a few suggestions for practical ways Christian parents can encourage healthy spiritual formation in a scrolling age.
1. Mind what you’re modeling.
So much of how kids learn is caught, not taught. And it’s mostly caught by parents—a child’s primary models for life, from birth to adulthood. Parents in the scrolling age need to be mindful that it won’t work to tell your kids, “Get off your phone!” if you are constantly on your phone yourself. Do as you say. Let your words be reinforced by your own discipline. Ask yourself: Are you frequently filling every gap moment in your day with scrolling? At family meal times, are you on your device? Do you and your spouse put your phones away and engage one another in front of the kids, modeling relational presence rather than distracted half-attention? If your kids see mom and dad always tethered to their smartphone, they’ll naturally grow up assuming devices like this will be critically important for them too.
So work on your own habits, and let your actions speak as loudly as your words.
2. Place boundaries around devices.
Limits are not legalistic or cruel. They’re loving. If you put boundaries around your kids regarding how far away from home they can ride their bikes, or how many cookies they can eat for dessert, do you also put boundaries around the when, where, and what, and how long of screen usage? Arguably, the hazards of screens pose greater risks to your kids than bike-riding or cookie-eating. In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt’s big point is that we tend to overprotect our kids in the “real world” and under protect them in the virtual world.
Consider these practical ideas for putting guardrails around your kids’ scrolling time:
Designate times during the day when screen time is allowed and when it isn’t. We let our kids watch a little TV while they have breakfast, and then usually after school for a bit while they have a snack. But in both cases, it’s a limited period and then it goes off.
Limit your kids’ media or scrolling activities to common rooms or areas where they can be closely monitored. Especially once they get older (but increasingly, even at very young ages), the things they are tempted to do on screens in bedrooms or private spaces are very dark and damaging.
If your kids have their own devices, consider device lockers or secure storage where they must be kept at certain times of the day.
3. Vet the voices.
So much of spiritual formation has to do with where we’re giving our attention. What feeds our minds feeds our souls, and what we give our limited attention to has profound power to shape us. Are you aware of the voices, podcasts, YouTube channels, and influencers your kids give their online attention to? Be proactive in vetting the media they consume, knowing it’s usually not a one-and-done but an ongoing process of being tuned in to what their watching and who they’re listening to.
4. Suggest alternative activities.
It’s a mistake to focus only on the “what you can’t do” aspect of digital habits. Parents need to creatively suggest “what to do instead” alternatives that are fun, compelling, and healthy for kids. We created a list that we put on our fridge, detailing about twenty ideas for activities not involving screens: reading books, doing puzzles, building a fort, playing with sensory bins, painting, board games, practicing Scripture memory, singing worship songs, hide and seek, etc. Yes, these activities can often lead to messes requiring cleanup. But protecting your kids is more important than protecting the house’s cleanliness. And part of protecting kids is helping them grow in analog wonder, boredom-fueled imagination, and tactile creativity. As Read Mercer Schuchardt argues in his chapter in Scrolling Ourselves to Death, we need to encourage young people to be tangible participants in life, not just scrolling spectators of it.
5. Get them outside!
Kids today need to know that the real world has always been, and will always be, more awesome than any virtual world. What they can see in the sky, and touch in the dirt, and smell in the garden will always be more interesting than what they can scroll through on their screens. Most kids have an ingrained curiosity that leads them to explore nature, climb trees, catch grasshoppers, and make mud pies. Let them. Encourage it.
Work on your own habits, and let your actions speak as loudly as your words.
God’s creation is an underrated source of Christian wisdom1, and time outside is something many experts note is crucial to childhood development2. So send your kids into the backyard for unsupervised play. Let them run around in local parks. Hike mountains as a family. Trek through forests. Go often to lakes, rivers, oceans. Look for wildlife. Plant whatever fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables that grow where you live. Be attuned to the seasons. Geek out over the weather. Encourage your kids to notice the real world around them, and teach them from a young age that this isn’t just random evolutionary happenstance; it’s our Father’s world. He created it intentionally, for his glory and our good.
6. Don’t beat yourself up.
I often feel guilty that I’m not doing any of the above things enough. Even as I write books about the importance of healthy habits in the digital age, my own family can sometimes be inconsistent. I’m sure most parents can relate. We realize we’re scrolling on Instagram while our kids shout, “Come play catch with me outside!” Or one of them gets to the point where they have to yell, “Daddy, get off your phone!” These are ouch moments. And they can be helpful, convicting wake-up calls.
But parents today shouldn’t expect perfection. And when you’re on a plane or long road trip, in a quiet public place, or at a nice restaurant, don’t stress if you temporarily ease up on screen time to keep the chaos contained. We’ve all been there. You’re not a bad parent if you break your own “rules” from time to time. In most cases, the norm matters more for our spiritual formation than the exceptions. Missing church once in a while isn’t a big deal if our long-term norm is weekly attendance. Going a few days without praying or reading your Bible isn’t detrimental if the norm of those habits is consistency.
The same is true for digital habits: aim for consistency, but don’t expect perfection. And above all, seek God’s guidance in the process. Pray for wisdom and discipline, but rest in his grace.
Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.
When you’re looking out into the realm of social media, it's easy to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes, but on what social media wants to talk about.
Parents, has your child ever said, “No! Don’t turn off my screen!” Why is too much screen time not good for your child? We have some thoughts that the Bible has pointed us to. As we think about how Christians evaluate technology and screen time, it’s admittedly challenging because there’s no Bible verse that says, “Thou shalt not use an iPad,” or a commandment that says “You can have twenty-five minutes of screen time per day.”
So as we think about this issue, there’s prudence and wisdom involved. I think wisdom and prudence are best informed by what we see in Genesis 1. When God creates us as human beings, our existence is an embodied existence—meaning, it’s something that is real, it’s earthy, it’s there—which means our best attempts to remove real friendships and real relationships and exchange that with a Zoom screen or a FaceTime call is never going to be truly adequate.
Please hear me: I’m not saying we can’t use Zoom or that FaceTime is bad. No, those things can actually be really good. But they shouldn’t be substitutes for what God has designed for us, which is to honor the reality that this life is meant to be lived in fellowship with our friends and like-minded brothers and sisters in Christ.
As we’ve thought about technology in our own home, we’ve thought about it less as an on-off switch and more as a dimmer switch. And so as we’re training our children, we are trying to give them a little bit more responsibility over their technology that they can handle. As we’ve been working with our thirteen-year-old daughter, we’ve been trying to train her with technology a little bit at a time. As we're training her, we’re trying to help her understand that technology is not all bad. Technology can actually be used as a good thing. God gave dominion over the earth when he gave it to Adam and Eve. He gave us dominion over things in order to create with the human creativity he designed us with. And so technology is flowing out of that creativity.
But technology can also be dangerous, sinful, and unrighteous. And so we have to train our children to start to see those differences and be responsible for those. We also want to help our daughter understand that there are going to be times when she has to be aware that what’s going inside of her heart may not be good, and she has to start safeguarding her heart by limiting what’s going in and seeing that what goes in comes out. We are a part of that training of safeguarding her heart and her mind.
God wants us to have physical, intimate, face-to-face community.
We also don’t want her to get so caught up in digital relationships that she loses her face-to-face relationships. God wants us to have physical, intimate, face-to-face community. And so we want to help her limit her technology so that she can have real, live, intimate community relationships.
And finally, we have to parent, and she has to obey. God has authority over us. He safeguards us. He limits us in different ways. And we have authority over our children, to limit and safeguard them. There are going to be times when they don’t agree with what we say when we tell them to turn off their devices, but they have to obey us, because we are doing what we feel is right for them. They are required to obey us just as we are required to obey God—even though sometimes we might not like the limits that he puts on our lives as well. So parents, stand strong against the technology that is looming in your household, and do your best to help transfer the responsibility to your kids, and guard them while you’re doing that.
Andrew T. Walker (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an associate dean in the School of Theology. He is a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. He resides with his wife and three daughters in Louisville, Kentucky.
Christian Walker is an accomplished curriculum writer and educator with experience both directing a large children’s ministry in a local church setting as well as spending numerous years in elementary education. She is a teacher at a classical Christian school in Louisville, Kentucky. She resides with her husband and three daughters in Louisville, Kentucky.
As a parent, we’re often trying to help our kids overcome fears that they might be encountering in their lives. But we have to remember that God never promises bad things won't happen to us.
When you’re looking out into the realm of social media, it’s easy to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes, but on what social media wants to talk about.
Our digital life can shape our theology in several ways. I think one of the most prominent ways it does is that it tends to make us think of theology through the lens of other things, like news or controversies. The whole Bible is given to us for our instruction, but it’s really easy, when you’re looking out into the realm of social media, to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes but on what social media wants to talk about.
The internet and social media are not simply mirror reflections of what’s important. These are programs that are engineered with algorithms to bring certain topics to the forefront and marginalize other topics.
So one of the things that I do see, especially of people of my age and even in myself, is a tendency to emphasize in our theology things that have a lot of bite online, and then we don’t want to talk about other things that aren’t as viral—things that don’t have the same kind of capacity for whipping up a big response online.
And so when we bring that kind of attitude to Scripture, we can, if we’re not being careful, instrumentalize Scripture. We can make Scripture’s teaching valuable to the degree that it allows me to argue with people, or it makes the other person look wrong, or it makes my life look righteous or beautiful.
And so that’s one way that technology can shape our engagement with theology for the worse. And we just have to be mindful of that and continually prioritize what the Scriptures prioritize, regardless of what the ambient culture might be saying.
Samuel James is an associate acquisitions editor at Crossway. He is the author of Digital Liturgies, a regular newsletter on Christianity, technology, and culture. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Emily, and their three children.
Our work, education, relationships, and even worship are increasingly happening digitally. Our tendency is often to think of these technologies as just neutral “tools." But this is not quite right.
All of life in the digital age is presenting us with a dizzying array of possibilities for where we spend our time, how we understand who we are, and how we perceive the world around us.
Gospel fluency isn’t just about talking. It’s about listening as well. This requires love, patience, and wisdom. We need to learn to slow down and listen closely to the longings of their hearts.
I recently observed a conversation a few Christians were having with a man who has yet to come to faith in Jesus. It was amazing to me, and saddening, to watch the Christians missing the point of this man’s struggle and questions. It seemed those speaking to him were more concerned about convincing him they were right than about listening to his heart. As a result, he walked away without any good news about Jesus, becoming even more convinced that this “religion” wasn’t for him. It’s not for me either—at least, not what I saw in that conversation.
We can do better. We must do better. We’re talking about people’s souls!
And we’re representing Jesus.
Helping people come to know the love of Jesus is the most important thing there is, and Jesus’s love for us compels us to love people better. If we don’t, the good news that people need gets muffled by our religious pride.
Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.” We need to become people of understanding—people who seek to understand others before we expect them to understand us and what we believe. We need to learn how to ask more questions and draw out what is deep inside people’s souls. We need to learn to slow down and listen closely to the longings of their hearts. We need to learn their stories. In short, we need to care more about winning people to Jesus than about winning arguments.
Gospel fluency isn’t just about talking. It’s about listening as well. This requires love, patience, and wisdom.
Drawing Out the Heart
Jesus was so good at this.
Whenever I consider how I can grow in being a person of understanding who listens well, I think of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well.1
It was high noon, when the sun was at its hottest. There was a reason this woman was getting her water at this time. She chose a time when no one else would be at the well. Nobody went there in the heat of the day. But she probably wanted to avoid running into one of the wives of the men with whom she had been sexually involved. She had had five husbands, and the man she was then involved with was not her husband. However, Jesus didn’t start with where she was wrong. He actually started in a humble posture of receiving from her.
He asked her for water, and she poured out her soul.
I’ve found that starting with a posture of humility, standing in a place of need and having a heart that is willing not only to give answers but also to receive insight, creates a welcoming place for people to open their hearts. The more open we are to listen and learn, the more likely people are to be open as well.
If you look at the story closely, you discover that Jesus continued to make very short, provocative statements that invited more conversation. He was drawing out, little by little, the longing of her soul.
He’s a master at drawing out the heart.
You notice this if you read the Gospels. Jesus regularly said just enough to invite further probing or create intrigue. He also loved to ask questions so that the overflow of the heart (belief) would spill out of a person’s mouth (words).
I’m amazed at how often well-intentioned Christians overwhelm people with a barrage of words. We go on and on about what we believe and what they should believe, assuming we know what others think, believe, or need. I often find that we are giving answers to questions people are not even asking or cramming information into hearts that are longing for love, not just facts.
We fail to listen. We fail to draw out the heart. And we miss opportunities to really love people and share the love of God with them. They also miss out on getting to hear what’s going on in their own hearts. I have found that when people, including myself, are invited to say out loud what they believe, they come to realize something is wrong.
Jesus slows down, draws out the heart, and listens.
One out of every two children born in the next thirty years will be born in Africa, but many won’t have access to God’s Word. Every $5 you give will provide a Bible for a child in need. Would you partner with us to support the future of the global Church? Learn More.
Talk Less, Listen More
As we are changed by the gospel, we want to share how the gospel has changed us. It’s a great thing to do so. In fact, one of the keys to growing in gospel fluency is to regularly share what Jesus has done or is doing in our lives with others. Our stories are powerful demonstrations of the gospel’s power to save.
However, if we don’t also listen, we tend to share the good news of Jesus in a way that applies primarily to our lives, the way it was good news to us, but fails to address the situations others are facing. We can become proclaimers of the good news while remaining ignorant of the ways in which others need to hear it. This doesn’t negate how good the news of Jesus is at all. However, if we read the rest of the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman, we find that while her testimony created intrigue, the people in the village had to meet Jesus for themselves. It wasn’t enough for her just to share her story. They had to get to Jesus as well.
So she brought them to him.
Our job is to testify to Jesus’s work in our lives while also listening closely to others so we know how to bring the truths of Jesus to bear on the longings of their hearts. We need to bring them to Jesus so he can meet their unique needs and fulfill their personal longings.
In order to do this, we have to slow down, quiet our souls, ask good questions to draw out the hearts of others, and listen.
Our stories are powerful demonstrations of the gospel’s power to save.
Francis Schaeffer said, “If I have only an hour with someone, I will spend the first fifty-five minutes asking them questions and finding out what is troubling their heart and mind, and then in the last five minutes I will share something of the truth.”2
My regular counsel to Christians these days is to spend more time listening than talking if they want to be able to share the gospel of Jesus in a way that meaningfully speaks to the hearts of others.
We were created by God to find our greatest satisfaction and fulfillment in him. Every human is hungry for God. Everyone has eternity written on their hearts, producing a longing for something—someone—better, more significant, and eternal. This is a longing for God (Eccl. 3:11). The cry of every heart— the native tongue of our souls—is for better, not for worse; for the eternal, not for the temporal; for healing, redemption, and restoration. And only Jesus can bring this about.
We all long for Jesus Christ. Everyone is seeking him, even if they don’t know it.
They are looking for something to fulfill their longings and satisfy their thirst.
However, they are looking in the wrong places. They are going to the wrong wells to try to draw soul water. They need to look to Jesus. But they will not come to see how he can quench their thirst if we don’t take the time to listen.
And as we listen, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can discern the longings of their hearts, the brokenness of their souls, and the emptiness of their spirits. And then, we must be prepared to show how Jesus can meet them at the well with soul-quenching water—himself.
Notes:
This story is from John 4.
Cited in Jerram Barrs, introduction to Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 30th Anniversary Edition (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2001), xviii.
Jeff Vanderstelt is a pastor, speaker, author, and founder and visionary leader of Saturate and the Soma Family of Churches. He serves as a teaching pastor and director of missional communities at Doxa Church in Bellevue, Washington. Additionally, Jeff supports church planting globally through training and as a member of the advisory board of C2C Network. He and his wife, Jayne, have three children. You can connect with Jeff at his website, JeffVanderstelt.com, or on Twitter (@JeffVanderstelt).
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
How do I present the gospel honestly and boldly without needlessly offending? How do I ensure I don’t slip into heresy by adding or subtracting from the gospel?
The Great Commission still applies to every single follower of Christ in every generation. Jesus’s command to make disciples of all nations remains just as compelling.
Every believer and every church is called to bear witness about Christ. But until motivated by the Spirit, our public witness is often weak and fickle.
Biblically speaking, masculinity is what long-term sanctification produces in Christian men and femininity what long-term sanctification produces in women.
How Do the Nonphysical Differences Between Men and Women Relate to the Physical Differences?
In C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novel Perelandra, Dr. Ransom is on the planet Venus and at one point witnesses an angelic celebration. He realizes that some of the angels seem to be masculine and some feminine. We’re told that Ransom “found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore.”1 There was something unmissable and yet also indefinable about this masculinity and femininity. Some of us may relate: we know masculinity and femininity exist, we recognize them when we see them, but we struggle to put our finger on exactly what each consists of.
In his book The Meaning of Marriage, Tim Keller makes a similar point:
It is my experience that it is nearly impossible to come up with a single, detailed, and very specific set of “manly” or “womanly” characteristics that fits every temperament and culture. Rather than defining “masculinity” and “femininity” (a traditional approach) or denying and suppressing them (a secular approach), I propose that within each Christian community you watch for and appreciate the inevitable differences that will appear between male and female in your particular generation, culture, people, and place.2
This means that true, biblical masculinity and true, biblical femininity are, respectively, simply what naturally emerges when men and women grow in Christ. Biblically speaking, masculinity is what long-term sanctification produces in Christian men and femininity what long-term sanctification produces in women.
This must certainly be true; whatever else manhood and womanhood are, they can’t be less than or different from godliness in a man or a woman. We can often recognize real masculinity and femininity when we see it, even if we don’t necessarily feel able to pin such things down.
Writer and teacher Jen Wilkin suggests that our physical differences go some way to explaining our nonphysical differences. For example, she says, the greater physical size and strength of most men compared to most women significantly shapes how each sex sees the world.3 Women, she suggests, will more likely be conscious of physical vulnerability in a way that won’t generally be the case with as many men, and as a result women are more likely to be attuned to and sympathetic toward vulnerability in others.
I was recently glancing at a discussion on Facebook about transgenderism and noticed that someone—not a Christian, by all accounts—made a similar point. The issue was whether transgender women (biological males identifying as female) could fully enter into the experience of womanhood without having had to encounter the world as a biological female, and this commenter (a woman) said, “In my experience men finally ‘get it’ when they become elderly. You have no clue what it’s like to live in a world where half the population can beat you to a pulp.” Entering into older age and beginning to experience a measure of physical vulnerability can help men understand something of what many women have experienced in the course of their whole lives.
This principle—that many of the observable differences between men and women have their origins in our physical differences—makes a lot of sense. Our body, soul, and spirit are deeply connected, as we’ve seen. It would certainly make sense that our bodily encounter with the world would shape how we each instinctively think, perceive, and behave. It would also make sense that the physical commonalities we share as a biological sex lead to general and observable differences between men and women that are nevertheless not absolute and which will vary from culture to culture.
Nonphyscial Differences
Some of these differences may be reflected in biblical passages addressed specifically to men or women. We need to be careful not to read more into such texts than may be there, especially by generalizing from something that may be particular. But it strikes me that in a number of places we may be getting some indirect glimpses into what some of our nonphysical differences look like.
In his instructions to Timothy about church life in Ephesus, Paul directs the following instructions to men:
I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling. (1 Tim. 2:8)
Paul is directing this call to pray specifically to men. This is not to suggest that Paul doesn’t want the women in the church to similarly lift up holy hands in prayer. The rest of the Bible makes abundantly clear that prayer is not a privilege reserved only for men. All Christians are to be people of prayer. But for some reason Paul felt that this needed to be said to the men in particular.
It seems that Paul’s words were triggered by particular behavior he’d learned about in the Christian circles he was writing to. Among the men, prayer was either being neglected or it was being practiced alongside ongoing enmity between them. Paul’s response is clear: he wants the men to lift holy hands in prayer. The focus is not so much on the hands being lifted as on them being pure. We’ll see at a later point that the Bible shows us a range of postures that were used in prayer—we’ll need to come back and think about that. But the point here is less about the posture than the attitude.
This must certainly be true; whatever else manhood and womanhood are, they can’t be less than or different from godliness in a man or a woman.
But though there is clearly specific behavior Paul is responding to, we also see that it has wider application. Paul hints at this by saying he wants men to be praying “in every place.” This goes far beyond what the guys are up to in Ephesus; the directive extends to men everywhere (and, by implication, in every time). This is not just for them there; it is for us too.
This being so, it may reflect something more generally true of men than women. Men are generally more likely to need to hear the admonition to pray than women. It is not that women don’t need the same level of encouragement to pray—they do. The issue instead is that perhaps men, overall, are more likely to be quarrelsome—not universally (all men, without exception), absolutely (all men to the same extent, with no variation), or exclusively (only men, as if women couldn’t be quarrelsome), but generally, typically. And if this is the case, then it makes sense of what Paul is calling men to do in response. If there is a tendency for men to be quarrelsome, then calling them to be men of prayer instead is not arbitrary. Rather than wrestle one another in conflict, they are to wrestle God in prayer (like Epaphras, in Colossians 4:12). Better to have “hands raised in prayer to God, not raised in clenched fists towards one another.”4 Inasmuch as men sense this trait within them, it is something that can be channeled in a healthy way and put to spiritual use.
The same may be true of what Paul then says to women in the next verses:
Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. (1 Tim. 2:9–10)
Again, we can assume Paul’s exhortation is prompted by particular behavior among his readers that he had become aware of. He is correcting a real issue in a real place. But (also again) the fact that this comes in a letter in which the aim is to show “how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15), we can assume it is not only about them but has wider significance beyond Ephesus at that time. If I am correct, we might expect to see another correlation between what Paul is steering them away from and what he is steering them to. The issue seems to be ostentatious dress. Not that Paul is discouraging effort in appearance; he’s discouraging effort that is deliberately attention seeking. This tendency isn’t entirely absent among men, and again Paul is not arguing against personal grooming or taking care in one’s appearance; he is arguing against ostentation.
Surely there is significance in that Paul’s instruction is directed toward women and not toward men. Just as not only men can be quarrelsome, so too not only women can be vain about appearance. But just as it is telling that Paul directed men in particular not to be quarrelsome, it is likely telling that here it is women he directs not to be ostentatious. I think we can legitimately infer from this that ostentation might be more of an issue among women in general than among men.
And just as Paul, observing a particular trait among men, directed them to channel that trait in a more spiritually constructive direction, so too he does the same here. If there is a tendency to draw the attention of others anywhere, it’s better to draw it toward God through good works than toward self through ostentatious appearance.
These texts were both prompted by Paul’s observing and redirecting negative traits. But he observes positive traits too. Writing to the Christians in Thessalonica, Paul reminds them of how he had ministered when he had been with them in person:
We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. (1 Thess. 2:7)
Paul often likens gospel ministry to the work of a parent. Here he specifically likens it to the work of a mother nursing small children. There was a warmth and tenderness in his ministry that brings to his mind how a mother cares for such a young child.
We mustn’t read into the maternal imagery more than is clearly there, but it is interesting that Paul should especially associate these traits with women nursing babies. He expects such care to be present among mothers. However typically they may be so, they are clearly not exclusively so, as here we find Paul himself embodying the very same qualities in his apostolic ministry.
This sort of tenderness is not uniformly going to be present in all mothers without exception, nor should men shy away from being characterized by it (or Paul would not be drawing attention to his own example of it). Gentleness, with all that it involves, is part of the fruit of the Holy Spirit that all believers are called to bear (Gal. 5:22–23). If it is true that it is more commonly found in women (or at least in nursing mothers), it is not meant to be found only there. This surely is the point. Inasmuch as there may be traits (positive and negative) that are generally true of men and women, we must not be hard and fast about it. Such traits (again, inasmuch as they exist) are not going to be characteristic of any sex absolutely, universally, or exclusively. They may be typical, but they will also be unevenly present and shared with the other sex as well. If, say, gentleness is more typical of women, it isn’t equally true of all women to the same extent. And some men are gentler than some women. This does not mean that such men are in any way lacking in their masculinity; it simply reflects that we manifest the ninefold fruit of the Holy Spirit in differing proportions, between the sexes and within them. God has not called women to bear half the fruit of the Spirit and men the other half. All of us are to be marked by all that comprises this fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. We celebrate these wherever we see them, and we never stigmatize any who bear some of them in surprising measure. Being more manly will never mean being less spiritual. Sam Andreades puts it this way:
Gender comes in specialties. Specialties are things we all might do sometimes, but the specialist focuses on especially doing them. We may do many things for each other that are the same, but the gender magic happens when we lean into the asymmetries. Just as, physically, both males and females need both androgen and estrogen hormones, and it is the relative amounts that differ in the sexes, so the gender distinctives are things that both men and women may be able to do, and do do, but when done as specialties to one another, they propel relationship.5
So the differences that exist are not absolute, as though the things men can do only men can do, and the things women can do no man could ever do. Yet there are some general ways in which men and women are distinct from each other while at the same time being very much alike. We are not meant to be interchangeable, so that all one can do, the other must also do in exactly the same way. It is not always helpful to compare one with another, as though we are pitted against each other in a zero-sum competition.6
As with many things, G. K. Chesterton hits the nail on the head in this short poem:
If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.7
Notes:
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943; repr., London: HarperCollins, 2005), 253.
Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Marriage with the Wisdom of God (New York: Dutton, 2011), 200.
Jen Wilkin, “General Session 2,” Advance 2017 conference, hosted by Acts29 US Southeast, accessed June 28, 2020, https://vimeo.com/243476316.
Angus MacLeay, Teaching 1 Timothy: From Text to Message (Ross-Shire, UK: Christian Focus, 2012), 99.
Sam Andreades, Engendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship (Wooster, OH: Weaver, 2015), 132; emphasis original.
See the observation by Eric Metaxas in Seven Women and the Secret of Their Greatness (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015), xviii–xix.
G. K. Chesterton, “Comparisons,” Poetry Nook website, accessed December 1, 2020, https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/comparisons-4.
Sam Allberry is the associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville. He is the author of various books, including One with My Lord; What God Has to Say about Our Bodies; and Is God Anti-Gay?, and the cohost of the podcast You’re Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Young Pastors. He is a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.
While we should be careful not to reduce gender to cultural stereotypes, we must realize that uprooting gender from biology effectively kills it. If gender can be anything, it ends up being nothing.
What do we say to our sons and daughters who ask, “Daddy and Mommy, what does it mean to be a man or a woman?” Tell them they are made in the image of God and for union with Christ.
The greatest challenge that the church faces today to avoid thinking like the world is the same as the greatest challenge that the church always faces to avoid thinking like the world.
The greatest challenge that the church faces today to avoid thinking like the world is the same as the greatest challenge that the church always faces to avoid thinking like the world. Now, one can specify peculiar temptations today that have not been dominant in another time or culture.
For example, if I’m speaking at a university mission today in the Western world, somewhere along the line in the Q and A that follows, people are going to say, “Well, that’s just your view of truth. People have a different view of truth.” The truth question, and the subjectivity of human claims, and knowledge attributions, and so on will always come up in the discussion.
But if I’m speaking at a university in the Middle East, nobody asks the question, “Yeah, but what is truth?” They may have some disagreements about what truth is and where it’s hidden and what it says, but very few people think there’s no such certainty as something called truth. If you’re in a part of the world where what the truth is is disputed, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily in the same part of the world arguing about whether truth exists.
Christians in every generation, including ours, are responsible for getting a firm grasp of what the gospel is, as taught by Scripture.
The church is constantly faced with one form or another of denial of the truth, or a modification of the truth, or a re-slanting or re-shaping of the truth. So in that sense, there’s nothing new when that happens today. There are some forms of such debates that have novel features to them. But as in Paul’s day, as in Jesus’s day, so in our day. People think that the most important thing about the Bible or the most important emphasis in the Scripture is such and such, and there will always be temptations to steer away from the centrality of the gospel—deeply, richly, and biblically defined. In that sense, there’s nothing new.
The particular element that’s being questioned will vary from culture to culture from time to time. But the danger of skirting the truth, ducking the truth, domesticating the truth, being bored with the truth, or confusing the truth with something that sounds much like it, that sort of phenomenon keeps coming back and back and back and back. So Christians in every generation, including ours, are responsible for getting such a firm grasp of what the gospel is, as taught by Scripture, and such a firm grasp of Scripture itself that at the end of the day, they’re less likely to be snookered by popular add-ons or popular adjuncts or the like.
D. A. Carson (PhD, Cambridge University) is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a cofounder and theologian-at-large of the Gospel Coalition and has written and edited nearly two hundred books. He and his wife, Joy, have two children and live in the north suburbs of Chicago.
D. A. Carson talks about his life and ministry, how God led him to the academy, the original vision behind the Gospel Coalition, and what it looks like to pursue simple faithfulness before God in his stage of life.
Some claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic, but in this video, Dr. Sharon James argues that a biblical worldview is essential for human freedom, flourishing, and fulfillment.
God's mission is what the triune God is doing in the world to save sinners. That's different than Christian witness: the way we participate in what God is doing.
D. A. Carson talks about some of the key themes that have marked his career, including his enduring passion for knowing and correctly handling God’s word and for holding tight to the gospel.
