Tech Thoughts

Last night and again this morning, I looked back over a paper I wrote on technology in 2021 and came across the quote below from a 21-year-old Jonathan Edwards that he wrote around summer 1726. And, earlier this week I watched a 28-year-old Steve Jobs give a lecture from 1983 that was amazingly so on point for where technology is today. For me, it was so impressive to hear someone describe the technologies of the 2020s in the 1980s and say that even though they had no idea how it will be made and how long it will take, but this is what the future will be able to do for research, applications, wireless communication, etc. So cool. And even more impressive was the Jonathan Edwards quote saying that one day God was going to make an invention that would allow people all around the world to communicate with each other without having to go to those locations. It almost as if (in the words of Matt Everhard and Tony Reinke) that Jonathan Edwards predicted the smartphone 280 years in advance 🙂

The moral of the story: God is free to bless us and glorify himself by using whoever he wants to do whatever he wants whenever and wherever he wants to do it—even through people we’ve never met who created things without planning for them to be used for specifically “Christian” purposes. The command of Genesis 1:26–28 means that whoever humanity spreads technology will also spread… may the Lord help his people to see that if ‘he’s got the whole world in his hand’ then there’s no bit, byte, tool, or tech that is outside of his providence.

’Tis probable that this world shall be more like heaven in the millennium in this respect, that contemplative and spiritual employments, and those things that more directly concern the mind and religion, will be more the saints’ ordinary business than now. There will be so many contrivances and inventions to facilitate and expedite their necessary secular business, that they shall have more time for more noble exercises, and that they will have better contrivances for assisting one another through the whole earth, by a more expedite and easy and safe communication between distant regions than now. The invention of the mariner’s compass is one thing by God discovered to the world for that end; and how exceedingly has that one thing enlarged and facilitated communication! And who can tell but that God will yet make it more perfect; so that there need not be such a tedious voyage in order to hear from the other hemisphere, and so the countries about the poles need no longer to lie hid to us, but the whole earth may be as one community, one body in Christ.¹

1. Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies”: (Entry Nos. A–z, Aa–zz, 1–500), ed. Thomas A. Schafer and Harry S. Stout, Corrected Edition., vol. 13, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2002), 369. ↩