the most high tech

the search for adventist techgnosis

If you went into a sabbath school and asked “What is technology?” what would you expect to hear in response? How would the youth’s and church elders’ answers differ?

If you asked a sabbath school from 1950… what would you expect to hear in response?

If you asked a sabbath school from 1900… 

If you asked a sabbath school from 1800… 

If you asked a sabbath school from 1700… 

What different responses would you expect?

Technology derives from the Greek techne which is a philosophical concept pertaining to art, skill, cunning of hand, in metalworking, shipbuilders, and soothsayers. Aristotle listed techne as one of five virtues of thought, along with episteme (knowledge), phronesis (prudence), sophia (wisdom), and nous (intellect). Compared to the others, techne is the most concrete: the form of thought interfacing between mind and matter. 

The concept of technology is inherently relational, emerging from the relationship between our imagination, materials, and our conception of time. What was it about the 17th century that brought calculus and steam engines out of the minds of their multiple discoverers? (What was in the air in the 1840s that brought us the beginnings of adventism, spiritualism, Marxism, and evolution?)

In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, the Medium is the Message. That is to say, the medium shapes our conceptions as much or moreso than the text itself. McLuhan writes “Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.”

Let’s see an example. What is the difference between your grandfather’s leatherbound Bible, an Oxford annotated Bible with Apocrypha, and a Bible app? For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume they’re all the same version— the same text. What is the difference between them?

Well, one is a family heirloom symbolizing patriarchal wisdom, love, or perhaps even authoritarian abuse; one is a textbook with academic introductions and historical notes; and one is an app. You would probably treat each of them as such.

As old as they are, the stories and texts of the Bible have passed through many forms— many media. Some scholars hypothesize the earliest verse in the Bible to be a song (Exodus 15:21). The documentary hypothesis describes which parts of the Hebrew Bible are likely from oral traditions older than the literary process(es) that cohered them into The Bible. How do the sung and spoken word differ from the written word? A spoken story captures tone, continues a living tradition, and is likely in dialogue with the local landscape.

What changes as a spoken text is written down? The text becomes more portable and loses emphasis on the skill of memory and performance. It also loses tone and embodied context. It also becomes prohibitively expensive to engage with the industry of scholars and scribes. You might even experience typographical errors that go unnoticed for generations.

Once scribes become mechanized, the printed word makes the text more accessible in portability and cost. While the text can now reach new lands, you’ll also need to translate it appropriately. If you have to translate one of the texts, you might as well translate all of them— losing the diversity and multiplicity of language and literary form. Any semblance of locality or tone is lost, so you put a map or two of the Holy Land in the back. Don’t bother including present day cities or indicating elevation, it’s not like anyone lives there anymore– straight up racism.

Introducing his biblically inspired comic book series Testament, Douglas Rushkoff describes the media history of the Bible…

The invention of text broke the monopoly that priests had on the collective story. Armed with a 22-letter alphabet, a ragtag bunch of Hebrew slaves went out into the desert and rewrote their reality from the beginning-- along with a new set of laws based on living ethics instead of falsely promised rewards in the afterlife. It was an open source proposition-- an ongoing conversation called Torah that eventually grew into what we now call the Bible.

Likewise, the invention of the printing presses turned that sacred document into a mass-produced book. No longer dependent on a centralized priesthood for the holy word, people read the Bible for themselves, developed their own opinions and reinvented Christianity as Protestantism. And today, the emergence of interactive technologies like the computer has revived the open source tradition, providing the opportunity to again challenge unquestioned laws and beliefs and engage with our foundation myths as participatory narratives, as stories still in the making.

Now, we have chatGPT to discuss theology with and Midjourney to illustrate Bible stories into cinematic, Marvel-style glory. Adventist churches are typically designed after modest meeting houses rather than awe-inspiring cathedrals. What do we lose with the spires? Or gain without them? When we congregate in rented office spaces? Churches are worshiping in movie theaters, dark rooms of shared visions. This is an era of imaginative opportunity, and yet American Christianity is stuck between the manufactured consent of corporate journalism and the gamified psychology of social media companies.

The Bible and its stories has been one of the longest standing inspirations to the human imagination (besides water, winds, mountains, and forests). The Christian church has been the largest patrons of art in history. Today it is little more than competing media companies. What could protect us from treating our own faith and spiritual experience as mere content?

In the words of Gustave Mahler, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” 

Thanks for reading.