A Way with Words

Using Our Online Conversations for Good

Daniel Darling

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781535995368
• eBook ISBN: 9781535995375
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Social media was made to bring us together. But few things have driven us further apart. 
 
Sadly, many Christians are fueling online incivility. Others, exhausted by perpetual outrage and shame-filled from constant comparison, are leaving social media altogether. So, how should Christians behave in this digital age? Is there a better way? 
 
Daniel Darling believes we need an approach that applies biblical wisdom to our engagement with social media, an approach that neither retreats from modern technology nor ignores the harmful ways in which Christians often engage publicly. 
 
In short, he believes that we can and should use our online conversations for good.
 

. . . always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

—2 Timothy 3:7

Until recently, I had a pretty good relationship with sleep. I didn’t need much of it, and when I did go to bed, I didn’t have a hard time falling asleep. But as my thirties turned into forties, sleep has come a lot harder. I’m not sure why—perhaps stress, perhaps mulling over that last argument with my wife, perhaps the tumbler of ideas that are always rattling through my head. It’s hard, these days, to turn off the thinker.

I have found that if I read before bed, I go to sleep much easier. There is something about a singular focus on one activity that helps prepare me for night. So lately I’ve made an intentional choice to read three or four chapters of a book at night. And I’ve taken to putting my phone across the room, to avoid the temptation to roll over and scroll endlessly.

Except that I have four wonderful children who frequently wake me up in the middle of the night.

We are in the season of parenting our four wonderful children where middle-of-the-night leg pain is frequent. The doctors tell us these are growing pains, but at the rate at which my kids wake us up with these aches, I’m starting to wonder if all of them might not end up tall enough to play professional basketball.

Typically Angela and I both wake up, but while I privately grouse about loss of sleep, she actually gets out of bed and offers the typical remedies of warm washcloths and liquid ibuprofen. On rare occasions my crankiness meets my conscience and I am the caring parent attending to midnight maladies.

But once I’m up I’ve found it hard to go back to sleep. So one of my temptations is to grab that glowing receptacle from its charger on the way back from a kids’ bedroom and then use my collection of unread articles and Google searches on things of interest to pass the time in the wee hours. “You need to put that thing away and just go to sleep,” my wife will often wisely say in a typically futile attempt to talk sense into me.

I’ve also reached for my phone on the occasional night when I’m restless, when a pressing issue or stress keeps me from closing my eyes. And after a fitful night, the next morning I always wonder why it is that I look to this endless portal of knowing called the internet to comfort my troubled, unquiet soul.

The Beginning of Knowledge and the End of Knowing

I’m not anti-iPhone, and this is not a book, as I said in the introduction, that is going to help you navigate screen time. But this is a book about words on the internet, and we do have to reckon with the way that we’ve virtually eliminated awkward quietness with an endless array of ways to occupy our brains.

It isn’t just in the night watches where we are tempted to turn to the internet for more information. Ever been in a long meeting and you have that itch to grab your phone and get “caught up” on what is going on in the world? Ever been on a family vacation where you’ve left your phone in your room on purpose and spent hours at the pool, only to try to invent reasons to sneak back in and check Twitter? Ever work on a book project like this one you are reading and have to fight the urge to pop into Facebook?

If you aren’t marking these questions with the hand-raised emoji, you should at least be silently doing this in your mind. According to a recent survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, 41 percent of Americans admit to being “compulsive phone checkers.”1 Why can’t we resist this impulse? Why are we so willing to forgo the rich conversations in the room for the fleeting comments online with people we don’t even know or don’t even like?

The pull toward the phone often begins with good intentions—with a desire to know more. We can gain some level of knowledge about our country’s political situation by reading that article we bookmarked, or garner information about work by checking email. We can get caught up on the day’s events by scrolling through our Twitter feed or learn whose birthday it is by checking Facebook.

This pull toward information is natural. Christians believe that God created human beings to pursue knowledge of him and of his world. This is inherent in the divine instructions given to Adam and Eve in the garden to cultivate the earth. King David describes, for instance, the way even the natural world pulls at our senses and leads us into an exploration of the unknown:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge. (Ps. 19:1–2)

The heavens, he writes, pour out knowledge.

There is no speech; there are no words; their voice is not heard. Their message has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world. (Ps. 19:3–4)

In other words, the world and everything in it have messages to be heard, even if there are no words. Trees aren’t writing sentences and oceans aren’t forming paragraphs, and yet in a way, they are, because creation can’t help but speak volumes about the Creator.

You can’t live as a creature in God’s world without the pursuit of knowledge. It’s impossible. The natural world is layered with information, shouting out to those who seek after God. This is why even secular scientists would admit that humans have only but scratched the surface of what is to be explored and known. There are untold wonders around the universe yet to be discovered.

And not only is it impossible to not be always learning, acquiring knowledge is something essential to human flourishing. Listen to the way the one who resists knowledge is mocked in Proverbs:

How long, inexperienced ones, will you love ignorance?

How long will you mockers enjoy mocking and you fools hate knowledge? (1:22)

To despise knowledge is to work against our own flourishing and to resist the way we were created by God to know and be known. And to pursue knowledge is to be enriched “with every precious and beautiful treasure” (Prov. 24:4). “Because they hated knowledge,” another proverb reads, they “don’t choose to fear the Lord” (1:29). To love God fully, Jesus reminded us, quoting from the Law, is to love with our minds (Matt. 22:37–40).

You don’t have to be a Christian like me to get this. Almost every sociological study affirms that education is a key factor in helping people move from poverty to purpose. And we should be grateful for the way technology has made knowledge much easier to access for the most vulnerable in ways that could only be dreamed of in almost every other era of human history.

I try to make this point with my kids. They think I’m a fossil when I tell them that when I was a kid there was no internet. Really, Dad? Yes, really. We had to get our parents to drive us to the library so we could work on that project for school. And yet I remember the rush of excitement when I got access to that micro-film and back issues of periodicals like Newsweek and Time. I remember specifically preparing a presentation on Watergate where I found countless magazine and newspaper articles. I remember being overwhelmed about the vastness of the information in our local library.

We still take our kids to the library and, thankfully, they think it’s awesome. But their first instinct when they need to know some information is to Google it or, even easier, to ask Alexa.

Having access to seemingly unlimited stores of information is, I think, a net good. Think of all the ways that lives are saved, that connections are made, that ordinary things in life have just been made easier because of the digital age.

The internet can help us find a church, connect with long-lost friends, and in many cases, help people find spouses and get married. The internet can help ignite important social movements, can keep us from getting lost in an unfamiliar location, and can give access to life-saving medical information.

As a Christian, I can and should applaud the progress of this digital age as a sign of humanity’s ability to create from the raw materials of God’s good creation. And yet, we have to acknowledge the downside, in a fallen world, of having so much information at our fingertips and the temptations this knowledge invites.

There is a way to pursue knowledge that leads away from flourishing and can lead us away from the source of our knowledge, God himself.

In his last New Testament letter, the apostle Paul, a well-educated, lifelong learner, warned his young protégé Timothy about a pursuit of knowledge that is “always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).

This, I believe, is what separates a genuine hunger for knowledge with a never-ending, insatiable thirst for knowing. There is a difference between a curious mind and a meandering heart.

The internet can make us smarter, but it can also be the equivalent of eating junk food three meals a day. Christians who live in this age have to resist the wrong impulses of either being drawn into endless rabbit trails of information or withdrawing completely.2

Information discipline begins, I believe, by getting to the heart of why we pick up our phones and why we often mindlessly hit “search” or why we give in to another guilty click on a click-baity article on a celebrity breakup. What is at the heart of our endless need to check in on social media, our never-ending Google searches for fruitless information, and our restlessness in this age of information?

With most questions, I’m drawn back to the very beginning of the Bible, to the story that Christianity tells about the nature of humanity and the character of God. God planted the first humans in a garden rich with sensory experiences and urged them to pursue knowledge and cultivate his good creation. But there was a tree, aptly named, I believe, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. On first blush, it’s hard for us to understand why God would not want his image-bearers to know good and evil. Isn’t knowledge a means of human flourishing in a world where God’s creation shouts information?

This question, actually, frames the serpent’s appeal to Eve: Why would God, if he is a good Father, keep this information from you? The fruit you are forbi...

Table of contents

• Introduction: A Book about Words
• Chapter 1: Ever Learning, Never Arriving
• Chapter 2: Slow to Tweet, Quick to Listen, Quick to Get the Whole Story
• Chapter 3: Biting and Devouring
• Chapter 4: You Shouldn’t Be Teachers
• Chapter 5: More Highly Than We Ought
• Chapter 6: Act Justly, Love Mercy, Post Humbly
• Chapter 7: Whatsoever Is True
• Chapter 8: As Much as Possible
• Chapter 9: An Analog Church in a Digital Age
• Chapter 10: The Internet for Good
• Appendix A: 10 Things the Bible Says about Our Speech
• Appendix B: How to Read the News
• Notes