“Will there be any Christians in Heaven?” read the provocative title of Leonard Sweet’s talk last week at GGBTS. Sweet, known for his future-oriented thinking and his challenges to the church to become what it was meant to be, came to the seminary to talk to a bunch of us who are wrestling with what it means to follow Jesus today. On a broad level, Sweet started with the idea of a major shift that happened in the last thirty years or so. You see, those of us who were born anywhere after the mid to late 1970s have grown up with what Sweet calls the “Google Generation.” Even though google wasn’t invented until the late 90s, the idea is that everyone in that generation has grown completely accustomed to having a wealth of information at our fingertips, wherever we are. The previous generation, dubbed the “Gutenberg Generation,” grew up in the era of print media, where information had to be mined and accessed primarily through words printed on pages. Now, in the era of blogs, Web 2.0, wikis, Internet searches (that yield millions of hits), digital libraries and the such, we live with the tension, as Sweet put it, “Everyone is an author and everyone is a publisher.” And that can be both a blessing and a curse.
It got me thinking about major shifts like Gutenberg to Google in areas that I’m passionate about – photography and biblical studies. When I got more seriously into photography about eight years ago, pro digital was in its infancy. I started with 35mm film, shooting negatives, moving on to slide film, even stepping into the arena of medium format with a sweet 6×6 rangefinder. I distinctly remember while taking photos for some gigs the anxiety associated with the very fact that I really had no guarantee that what I thought I was capturing on film was actually going to be there. Instead, I had to wait a whole day or so to see the results come back. Digital photography changed all of that. Now, seemingly everyone has a digital camera. Instant feedback is the norm. Blogs with tutorials abounded. Photo blogs, photo sharing sites, home print shops, all of that has become the norm. Expert information now accessible to the masses.
Let’s shift the discussion to the arena of biblical studies. Among my favorite classes in seminary have been Hebrew and Greek. Something about it just connects with how my brain is wired – I love seeing patterns, dissecting paragraphs and sentences, diving deep into the study of a Bible passage, and asking lots of questions. It’s actually quite invigorating for me. Along the way, a huge help for me in this area has been a piece of technology, software to be precise, called Logos Bible Software. Whereas in the days before, one had to painstakingly parse verbs or count by hand the number of occurrences of a text, or look up manually in a real book a reference, Logos does all of this for you. You can hover your mouse over a word in Greek, double-click, pull up a commentary, link all the books together so they scroll simultaneously, do intensive searches on all sorts of topics with all sorts of parameters – all without even leaving your chair. Some would look at this as the end of an era, much like the end of analog film. Much of this resulted from an instant gratification, a “microwave” generation expectation, so to speak. Expert information now accessible to the masses.
In so many ways, this shift is good. It opens up things that were once only available to a select few to a much larger audience. Technologies like Wikipedia have made a significant contribution to the dissemination of information. Yet Sweet brought up a very interesting point toward the end of his talk – “These are the first generations of kids that do not need authority figures to access information.” It’s all there. But then he went on to say, “But where the generation needs us more than ever (you used to have kids to work the fields, not to work the remotes), they need help in process – what do I do with all this information? How do I turn it from information to knowledge to wisdom?” And there you have it. Information does not equal wisdom. And that’s where I think training of various sorts comes in. (Which, by the way, won’t be the same type for everyone, since God wired us all differently.) The information alone will only get us to a point. It has to be processed and put into practice. Applied wisdom, ahh, obedience, information activated – now you’re on to something. I think that’s one of the primary areas where the church is meant to come alongside each other in community and cultivate that kind of a relationship with Jesus. And ultimately, it’s not what you know, but who you know. Christianity is about a relationship with the living God.
Digital photography is great. So is Logos. But here’s where I think the dots between mentors and training and tools can connect. We can’t focus on just the tools alone, but how to use the tools. I’ve been in seminary for more than four years now, and I’ve been hugely blessed by the experience. Having something like Logos to my toolbox has been a huge boon for me – I’m able to take ideas that I’ve got in my head – either from class or preparing a Bible study or a sermon – and process those ideas through some real data available at my fingertips. And I’m constantly reminded not to seek just the information, but real wisdom – applied knowledge. Moreover, I’m reminded that gifts like teaching and knowledge are meant to bless others, not to be kept inside one individual. When that starts happening, when one member of the body blesses another, who in turn blesses another (2 Tim. 2:2), then you start to see movements happen. Even though I look at this era that we live in with some trepidation and uncertainty, I rest assured in the God who stands above all of history and has the whole trajectory in view.
Those of you who know me know that I can get really excited about certain things. Logos is one of them. And for those of you who are in seminary at the moment, they’re making a $1,000 scholarship available, and whoever gets it also gets a really nice copy of Logos. Tuition can be expensive, and anything can help. Check it out here: seminary scholarship. All you’ve got to do is watch a video and fill out some forms. For those of you who aren’t looking for a scholarship at the moment, you can still check it out at http://www.logos.com. And for all of these things – be it seminary, a computer, a piece of software – they’re tools – among many different types – that are out there that can help us in our journey of following Jesus.
Oh, and Sweet’s answer to the question above is this – Jesus was all about pointing people toward what it means to be truly human, that is, the way we were meant to be.
