This is the first in a series of articles. For Part 2 click here.
The world changed dramatically in 2020. I’m sure you remember it. In internet searches, the word ‘unprecedented’ was used five times as often as in the years prior. There was a surge in the use of the term, a stunning rise that was without… precedent. The data reflected a reality. The world was changing. Parents had become teachers. Non-essential workers were figuring out how to do their job from home. One American trial lawyer, forced to argue from his computer, accidentally turned the cat filter on. I think that’s probably unprecedented.
In other ways, the COVID-19 pandemic was similar to events that came before. In certain ways it had a precedent. The Spanish Flu reached Australia in 1919. The pandemic spread exponentially, much like COVID. On the 1st of February 1919 all church services in Sydney were banned. The papers were full of debates about the shutdowns and the vaccine. There were small differences between then and now, but common patterns. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” 1919 rhymed with 2020, and thus gave it a precedent.
As unprecedented as it feels, most of history is a rhyme of something prior. It feels new and novel, but it’s old and common. Wars, rumours of wars, famines and earthquakes are the norm, they are the chorus that repeats. Good luck finding a significant period of history without war, famine, or earthquakes.
So, in our rhyming world, what is truly new? What is genuinely different about modernity? What is actually unprecedented and not just a misuse of the term?
I think the answer is technology.
Technology and Unprecedented Change
Technology brings genuine change into the world, disrupting ancient patterns, messing with the rhyme. You live in a different world to the world of the seventeenth century. It’s so deeply different, with so many layers of technology, that you can’t imagine the past without intense effort. The past is like a fossil, buried beneath so many layers of sediment that it’s almost inaccessible.
This wasn’t always so. The ancient world rhymed more distinctly. The working life or family life of a person in the fifteenth century would have been comprehensible to someone in the third century. The Industrial Revolution (particularly the Second Industrial Revolution[1]) tore apart these patterns. It created something genuinely unprecedented.[2] The British historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that “the Industrial Revolution marks the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world recorded in written documents.”[3]
If you’re not convinced, consider this description of life before the technological revolution:
Having bought their food, the mass of the people had little left for their wants … In preindustrial Europe, the purchase of a garment or of the cloth for a garment remained a luxury the common people could only afford a few times in their lives … During epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to take over their clothes.[4]
Does that rhyme with the patterns of your life now? When COVID happened, did the authorities have to confiscate clothes to stop the rest of us from looting?
What changed the world? To pick one thing, the spinning of cotton, a key step in the production of clothes, became 370 times more efficient between 1775 and 1825, with inventions like the water frame and the Robert’s automated mule.[5] Progress at that scale and speed created a genuinely new world. You might not have heard of either of those inventions, they are too deep in the sediment, buried beneath thousands of later discoveries. Today, the old world for teenagers is the world of dial-up internet. The old world for me is the world of steam trains. And yet even both of these are utterly modern, as modern as the suburbs, as modern as the fridge, as modern as having a source of light after 7pm.
Apart from visiting, say, rural North Korea,[6] how can we even imagine the past? And if it’s so hard to understand the past, how do we prepare for the future? Will the future rhyme, will it have any connection to the present? Or will it be deeply unprecedented and unpredictable?
Artificial intelligence is the technology most likely to create a new and unprecedented world. The plummeting cost of cotton or electricity changed the world. What would a plummeting cost of intelligence do to our sense of normality? What happens when we can turn on superintelligence for roughly the same cost that we can turn on a light?
Technology and the Unprecedented Future
Since the Industrial Revolution our world has changed over and over again. Technology after technology has rained down upon us. Before we can digest the last invention, someone stands on a stage in California and we brace for the new, new thing.
The young often enjoy this and the old often hate this. As Douglas Adams wrote:
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.[7]
I turned thirty-five last year. I’m now in Adams’ final category. New technology, formerly exciting, now feels a bit more threatening.
Christians need to think about technology because the change won’t stop. Being a Christian in 2024 means being a Christian in a dizzying world, a Christian after the stability of precedence. Inevitably, technological change brings social change. Society follows technology. Inventions shape the world.
Bad Ways to Deal with Technological Change
The first mistake that Christians make is what I’ll call the amiable separation. Our technology-riddled lives feel distant from the world of the Bible. Christianity feels like a Sunday thing, a spiritual thing, a philosophy, but not a lifestyle. Christianity doesn’t tell you whether to be on TikTok. It doesn’t mention your modern occupation or tell you whether to fix your mortgage. As time passes, more and more of life is about stuff the Bible never mentions. We can’t even proof-text, since no verses address neural networks, social media, international travel, or life insurance. Christianity can become news about the past but not the present, facts but not wisdom.
And so, Christians can become functional non-believers in the major matters of life, thinking about our world in the same way others do. We won’t be salt and light; we’ll just be more of the same, but with different things printed on our coffee mugs. When the next generation sees the disconnection between our faith and our lives, they’ll be tempted to ditch the faith altogether.
The second mistake that Christians make is just as harmful. The second option is for us to become mystics. We won’t seek guidance from the Bible, unless it’s vague, short, and probably out of context. We will wait for individual guidance from God in the way of dreams, visions, hints, nudges, feelings of certitude. We will demote the word of God and seek new words from God. We won’t make large decisions on the basis of God’s sufficient principles stated in Scripture.
Then the next generation would learn from this that our faith isn’t based on the objectivity of God’s word. They’ll question whether we are just speaking to ourselves, just following our feelings. They won’t be drawn to the objective reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus. They won’t pray to understand the Bible more. They’ll pray for visions in the night.
The Unchanging Bible and a Changing World
Instead, we need to read the Bible and see the forest, not just the trees. God has given us “all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence” (2 Pet 1:3). A Christian has all things that pertain to life and godliness, even in this unprecedented age. That’s quite a description. “Godliness” is a very large category, and “life” covers quite a bit. Christians know that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16–17). Again, “every good work” is quite an embracive category; and it applies even after any technological revolution.
Christians often underestimate how much our Bibles speak into the issues of the modern world. Part of the problem is that we simply don’t know our Bibles well enough. But perhaps more than that, we don’t practice connecting our Bibles with our world. The Bible offers a framework, a set of principles. It offers a narrative to understand ourselves, our world, our past, our future; the dangers of life; the virtues and vices of life. If we understand the story of the Bible, we’ll understand that, though the Bible doesn’t talk about our modern technologies, it sure does talk into them.
The Example of Social Media
Take social media as a case study. How do the deep principles in the Bible speak into the issue of social media? How does our doctrine of sin speak into social media? The biblical picture of sin includes both debauchery and people-pleasing, both licentiousness and legalism. How do you see each of those on social media? How does our doctrine of creation, or the cross, or the new creation speak into social media? What goal is our world heading towards? Is it a world of individualism or a world of community? How does the goal of the new creation differ from the direction social media takes us?
These might be hard questions, and this might be hard work, but it’s work we need to do. It’s work we need to do more explicitly. We should use phrases like “I’m worried about social media because of my doctrine of sin”, or “I’m excited about BeReal because of my belief in the importance of authentic community”, or “I’m divided about the impact of online sermons because of my doctrine of church”. We live in a technological world, we make technological decisions, and we need to be more and more biblical about the way we do so.
Wisely Facing the Unprecedented Together
Doing this well requires precision. There’s a layer of wisdom between doctrine and technology. People rightly disagree about the ethics of various technologies. What we are doing, in connecting Bible and world, is neither purely objective nor arbitrary, it’s in the middle, in the land of applied wisdom. We are people who fear God, study his word, and face a world that is ever changing. We are answering difficult questions.
Here’s the good news in our age of the unprecedented: we face our changing world together, with each other, in God’s church, with his Spirit guiding us and his word informing us. We may be surprised by the turns of history, but as the great Colin Buchanan sings: “nothing takes God by surprise”.
Here’s a truth in every age: in the eternal plan of God, everything has a precedent.
Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about technology? I will consider this in my next article.
This article has been adapted from material in Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You (2024).
[1] The period roughly from 1870 to 1914. It saw the widespread application of steam power and machine technology to factories, railroads, civil engineering; along with the invention of the telephone, the internal combustion engine, the mass production of steel, the adoption of assembly line manufacturing, and many other developments.
[2] As the American economist Brad DeLong writes: “All that was solid melted into air—or rather, all established orders and patterns were steamed away. Only a small proportion of economic life could be carried out, and was carried out, in 2010 the same way it had been in 1870.” Slouching towards Utopia: An economic history of the twentieth century, Basic Books, 2022, p4.
[3] Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, The New Press,1999), xi.
[4] CM Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European society and economy, 1000–1700, 3rd edn, Norton, 1993, p18.
[5] S Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A global history, Vintage Books, 2015, p 67.
[6] North Korea is largely a pre-industrial country and is dark at night. South Korea is an advanced, nuclear society, a collection of things invented. The south is brightly lit after dark. It is also the country with the lowest fertility rate on Earth, where births are two thirds lower than what a steady population would require. This too is a technological change, and this too is unprecedented.
[7] D Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the galaxy one last time, Macmillan, 2002.
