Simple Living Isn’t Always

“There is a limit to the promise of new technology, and that it cannot be a substitute for human values.”–Neil Postman

It may be that our romance with technology has finally run its course. Our expectation that technological advances will contribute to or bring about a supremely humane way of life has suffered blow after blow as technology has overpromised and underdelivered, dehumanizing us and our way of life as often as not.

Case in point: this story about a couple now charged with neglecting their children. It’s a stunning reminder of the dark side of technology.

Social workers removed the babies (22 and 11 months) to a hospital. The children’s condition is horrifying.

Police said hospital staff had to shave the head of the girl because her hair was matted with cat urine. The 10-pound girl also had a mouth infection, dry skin and severe dehydration.

Her brother had to be treated for starvation and a genital infection. His lack of muscle development caused him difficulty in walking, investigators said.

The culprit? The instigator of all this neglect? Video games, especially an online role-playing game. This article put me in mind of the movie “Children of Men”, where an official’s son is shown playing a game so obsessively that he ignores everyone in the room, and doesn’t even look away from the game to take his medication. Sound familiar?

As a sometime player of video games, I can testify to their “addictive” characteristics, particularly of role-playing games. But the growth of such an addiction, and others like it, probably stems from the refusal of our society to teach real values. Indeed, as several writers including Douglas Wilson have pointed out, teaching values without an absolute Value leads to cognitive dissonance for which there is no remedy.

What I mean is this: education necessarily produces dissonance. Learning (especially godly learning) demonstrates the “two laws” at work in our world: the law of God and the law of man. And in response to such dissonance, godly education demonstrates the answer that is in the person of Christ.

If we educate human beings about their surroundings, they will begin to see that our world is and is not ordered. In other words, there is an underlying order to our universe, including the natural laws God enacted. If we throw a rock, it will come down. We can keep time by monitoring the sun’s position in the sky. The earth’s orbit remains constant. These are things on which we can depend.

The Fall of Man, however, moved the world to stand on the brink of chaos. That chaos at times spills into our world, wreaking havoc on what we know. This is not to say that disasters are separated from God’s just nature; they are not. He is sovereign. But they appear random.

In reality, though we often accuse God of authoring such evil, the old Pogo cartoon tells the truth: “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.” We are the author of the chaos. Our own sin, the Bible teaches us, “bruised” the world. Whether it’s the inhumanity demonstrated by a Pol Pot, or a Stalin, or a Hitler, or the terror produced by a Torquemada. Story after story is evidence for a truth we would like to avoid. Human sin is a virtually invincible virus, resisting every treatment devised by man’s mind. Despite medical and psychological advances that border on the miraculous, we have been unable to cure sick souls.

As Paul writes in Romans, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” The troubling thing is that our best efforts are still unrighteousness in the presence of the absolutely righteous God.

We might fall into despair at such a revelation. Thankfully, we are not left without a savior. Although we have no righteousness and cannot produce it by any means (even technological), we have hope.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it–the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26)

So in the face of a troubling story, we can first accept the dissonance that comes from this example of our broken world. Then we can see the solution, who is Jesus Christ, a demonstration of God’s righteousness. Finally, we can hope, since Christ is a guarantee that the world has been mended and is mending. In evangelical-speak, the kingdom of God is both now and not yet. Even such as us (including the addicts and neglectful among us) may be redeemed to God’s glory.

And not even a jetcar could improve on that.