Postmode

There are many misconceptions that the common populace has about the process of design and development, especially for the internet, with website design and development (which is what I do for a living). Case in point: I’ve had people ask me to develop a fully-functional, large-scale site with features requiring highly-advanced programming - in one week. Part of the problem is that they don’t have a good analogous understanding of what the design and development process is like. Imagine it like this: you are on a hill. However, you are blind. Furthermore, every time you take a step somebody puts you on a portable merry-go-round and spins you until you’re confused enough that you don’t know which way is uphill and which way is downhill. The design process involves taking one step at a time. But since you’re blind and can’t tell whether the next step you take will be uphill or downhill, you don’t know whether it’s going to be uphill or downhill. Thus, the design and development processes amount to taking one step, evaluating whether it was worse or better, and then going backwards or forwards depending on whether your last step took you uphill or downhill.

Donald Norman touches on this in The Design of Everyday Things:

Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The folk artists change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it justs gets changed again on the next go-round. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take on step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill - or at least at a local peak.

Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things p. 142

Thus, a lot of these unrealistic expectations about the design process can be seen in light of this analogy. Smaller tasks are smaller peaks. They can be traversed more quickly than larger peaks. But the thing about larger peaks is that they often have more crags, cliffs, and inherent dangers. Thus, the user naturally expects that a larger project (say, a 5,000 foot peak, as opposed to a 500 feet peak) will only take 10 times longer to complete, not realizing the exponential factor included in increasingly large projects.

I’ve been reading New Testament History by F.F. Bruce. Some of his writings brought to mind recollections that the early Christians were considered atheists because they refused to believe in the pagan gods. I can’t remember if this pops up anywhere in scripture, but I did want to include some of what F.F. Bruce says about the commonalities between the Epicureans, Christians, and Atheists here:

Epicurus’s doctrine was completely materialist; living beings and lifeless things alike were produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. When men and other living beings died, the atoms of which their souls consisted immediately dispersed and all sensation ceased; by this denial of the immortality of souls Epicurus hoped to liberate men from the fear of death. He did not deny the existence of gods; they too were composed of fine atoms and lived in the spaces between the worlds, enjoying perfect blessedness, undisturbed by concern for mankind or worldly affairs…

…Lucian, the satirist of Samosata (second century A.D.), couples Epicureans and Christians as people who were unlikely to be taken in by charlatanry; when Alexander the oracle-monger institutes his fraudulent mysteries, a preliminary proclamation is made: ‘If there be any atheist or Christian or Epicurean here spying on our rites, let him speedily begone!

F.F. Bruce, New Testament History pp. 42, 43

How far have we drifted when as Christians we are now considered gullible fools? Not all of this is simply from the proclamations of atheists that such is the case: it has its basis in reality. It is odd, in this time, to see the past coupling Christians and Atheists as those who would not fall for trickery and ungodly deceit. And yet we have televangelists. Don’t tell me we have a God while Benny Hinn still lives (*sarcasm*).

Everybody sins: that’s part of the message of the gospel. We’ve all sinned, and furthermore, not only have we all sinned, we all have a sin nature that refuses to repent of both the sin nature and the sins that consequentially follow. The other part of the gospel is this: that even though we have all sinned, Jesus Christ died for the ungodly and in his grace has saved some of those who refused to acknowledge him as king.

Too often, though, we start from here and don’t think through the implications for how we as followers of Christ interact with the culture around us. All sin is evil and an act of treason against God. But when we’re looking at the sins of the individuals embedded in and part of our culture, we don’t stop to think about how this should change the way that we deal with the sins of the culture. There exists a fundamental unwillingness to address culture from scripture.

Christians in culture have a track record of being notoriously sinful when we interact with people who clearly do not share our beliefs and live in unrepentant sin. By way of example, in the culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, the most significant sin we are known for doing this with is homosexuality - compare with, say, Fred Phelps. Most of us don’t go as far as Fred Phelps, but nor do we get any closer to being God-honoring in the way we interact with our culture. When we consider the nature of the gospel and all of the things that go along with that - the imago Dei, the Mosaic law and Paul’s words about culture’s embracing of homosexuality, the nature of Jesus as prophet, priest, and king - we are not at all acting with these values in line. We are hateful, we are malicious, we are unloving. We ignore and alienate our culture, but we never stop to love them like Jesus and seek to see them come to treasure him like we do. And why is it that we fail in this? More on that at the very end.

Presented here are five fundamental truths that we ought not to be coy or reserved about. When talking with people who live in our embattled culture, we need to understand these five truths at a fundamental level, and they should affect everything about the way that we embrace and work within that culture. Not only should these affect our views, but they should be the main dish of anything we have to say about Christ and culture.

1. Every human person is made in the imago Dei, the image of God. The implication of this is that when we treat any person like the sinners they are, we are not in a place to do so. Yes, there is a place for acknowledging the words of God. Yes, there is a place for punishing crimes against God and man. Yes, to do all of this we have to be open and honest about everything we believe and are. But too often when we work within our culture we are hateful, malicious, and unloving to the people who are sinners by nature, under God’s common grace for a time but his sovereign wrath in death.

   Our role as Christians is to treat all people as bearers of the image of God. Accordingly, we listen to God’s word and what that has to say about the person, and we follow it. Note that this is far different from respecting people in line with the religion of multiculturalism: we do not respect homosexuals along with purveyors of other sins merely because our differences are valuable in themselves, but because we honor and respect God and his purposes and standards.

2. Both the law and the gospel condemn sin. Anything that scripture says is a sin (as opposed to sin as human nature) is as it says and should be treated accordingly. Found in Christians, we should discipline behaviors that is sinful. In those who do not know Christ, we should be very open in identifying it as such and saying the truth, which is that…

3. All sin will is worthy of death. Anybody who has a sin nature is under God’s wrath. Only those who repent of that sin, being saved by God’s grace, will be saved. Romans 6:23, people.

4. This is the most significant part of our interaction with culture: Christ is lord of all. He is the king, because he is God.

   What does this mean and how does it season our interactions with others? It means that as king, any act of sin against him is an act of treason and worthy of death. We already know that. But we need to state this more clearly: As king of all, and not just those who follows him, what Christ demands and has a right to demand is the complete obedience of all the world to what he says. If Christ says it, we should be doing it. We have a responsibility to bring all glory to God as God.

5. When we bring glory to God, that is what will bring us the greatest joy. This is the key part that is always left out when we work within our culture. We never say this to each other, and we never say it to those who do not know God. We have been deceived straight out of the pit of hell into into believing that obedience to Christ means a constant, painful rejection of all the things that are sin, and we have believed that this is the whole truth. But the whole truth includes this: there is joy in obeying Christ. Yes, rejecting of sin is painful because everything in us cries to take joy in things that cannot give us joy. But that doesn’t mean we’re trading something for nothing. We aren’t getting gypped. If we lose sight of this, we will never understand how to work within our culture. Particularly in the case of homosexuality, we have forgotten to say, “But it is for your own joy that God says these things. What God offers is so much better.” We’ve forgotten that even though the struggle is just that, and at times painful, it is our own joy that we are fighting for, and that God has sovereignly promised to give us in justification, sanctification, and glorification.

That we are fighting for our own joy when we refuse to sin, and instead follow Christ as king, is the greatest thing that we make ourselves forget quickly. In fact, because the vanguards of Christianity have forgotten this, some people are growing up in the church without ever even knowing it. And it shows in the way that we live and in the ways that we interact with our culture. We are to set the tone for culture, and culture, whether we like it or not, follows the Church. Is it any wonder that we have a society that refuses to acknowledge God? It’s because we don’t either.