How is Facebook and Twitter and our online habits changing us? This continues to be an unresolved question that presses for clarity, and it's a question I've been meaning to ask Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh. Bruce is a historian and the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver.

In my research on the life and theology of John Newton, I depended on his groundbreaking research, which was published in his landmark book, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition. Bruce joins us now over the phone. Bruce, you're a historian focused on the spiritual life, and you are willing to address how technology influences the Christian life today.

For the next three days, I want to focus on this and bring your very unique perspective to it all. So we, of course, live in this age of technological advance with all of its glory and all of its conveniences and all of its consequences. Digital communications technology like email and texting and social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all of it is relentless, it seems.

So how do you think this culture of digital technology harms or hinders the spiritual life of the Christian today? Yeah, that's a really, really important question. In many ways, it's an important question of our time, and I wish there was more writing being done and more thinking being done about this.

My colleague Craig Gay is working on a book on this subject, and I'm really looking forward to what he's going to say about it. But I think one of the things we have to do, first of all, is pay attention to form as well as content. And there's a lot of good, intelligent books about this kind of thing, about how the medium is part of the message, and that the medium is not neutral.

It's not just an envelope, and you can just throw the same content in any old envelope, and it's the same thing. So I think part of that is reframing and how we're thinking so we can think well about discipleship. And the benefits are obvious, and you mentioned some of them, the conveniences, the accessibility, the flexibility, the unbelievable resourcefulness, the instant nature of the communication and the resources that are available.

I think I want to, because those are so obvious, I would rather sound the note of some of the dangers to the spiritual life of screen communication, and communicating through screens and through the digital envelope. And people will be all too familiar with these, and some of these are widely known.

But the first one is distraction. We are all already, just our spiritual condition is one of having spiritual ADD, and we are all easily distracted from the important issues of our lives moment by moment. But the nature of digital communication is that we are endlessly distracted. And if that was true already sort of prior to the advent of social media, there was enough in the digital world to be distracting.

It's all the more true in terms of notices and updates. Apple Watch has just been released, so that on your very wrist you can have all your notifications and so on. So one risk to think about is distraction, having a dispersed consciousness. I remember one of my teachers saying there are some things in the spiritual life you need to be reminded of every six minutes.

And to be recollected is the old word for this, to be recollected that we are in the presence of God, and we are living intentionally, living out of a calm center spiritually. I think that's hard. Another one is trivialization of communication. And I think that there is a lot of communication that is atomized and is trivial.

And it's not that there aren't very serious things done. But if we think, it's hard to imagine the Oxford book of emails, the Oxford book of text messages. There's just something about the media that does allow a trivialization. And I think we need to be aware of that. And it's not that profound things can't be written in the digital age.

I think there's an atomization, I alluded to this, of knowledge where in the digital world things are literally like at the level of a code, they're broken up into atoms. And it means it's harder and harder to see how things are connected to holes, to see how things are integrated, how this is a part of, this particular insight is a part of God's world, is connected to a whole way of seeing the world.

It just is fragments. And we experience the world as fragments, and we don't understand how this has to do with everything else. There's a lot of hierarchies of knowledge. And in many ways today that hierarchy seems like a bad word. But it used to be, like if I wanted to publish something, just the expense of publishing means that my proposal goes through a peer review process.

It goes through rigorous scrutiny, and there's many people who are examining what I have to say prior to it being released. And there's all sorts of good things about being able to directly get one's message out. But the loss of hierarchies is potentially a loss of filtering. It's a loss of wisdom.

It means that knowledge is not a part of a system of apprenticeship, where there's an apprenticeship, there's a learning from those who have experience and wisdom, who've been entrusted and authorized. And so there's a way that we've lost that ability to see things in terms of how they relate to authorities and trusted authorities.

There's a danger of posturing and image posturing in the digital world. Everybody is happy on Facebook. Everybody seems to have a better life than I do. And a long, long time ago at the beginning of the modern period, there was a fellow named Jürgen Habermas who just wrote about even with the beginnings of periodical press, periodical literature, and the expansion of print media, there was a new kind of way of understanding oneself.

And that is that we have an audience-oriented sense of self. We understand ourselves as communicating to an audience. And anybody who's been on Facebook understands all of a sudden you're just constantly thinking about communicating to an audience. And there's something about that that can be very damaging to realism.

And thin rather than thick communication is like you're communicating through a pipeline. The first kind of committee meetings I've been a part of are the ones that are by conference call. You have thin communication. You don't get three-dimensional feedback and all the richness of communication of being face-to-face, all the nuances and so on.

And most important, and you can forget all the rest of those as if that isn't the long enough list, but is the disembodied relationships, the disembodiment. And I think that's the most significant thing. And I think that's the only world we're in. For all of the friends we have on Facebook, this is a lonely world.

I can't raise my children by Skype. Bodies, being present bodily to each other is so important. Bodies are not what define the limits of my autonomy. My body defines the extent of my availability. It's my body that allows me to be present to give and receive love. My body is what makes me available to others and makes them available to me.

And this digital world of not now, not you, and not here is disembodied. So I think one of the most radical things we can do as Christians right now in this world is face-to-face communication, and preferably around a dinner table, around a meal. And the richness of that. I think that's a bit of a coax, and I think that Christ left us with a meal in the upper room.

But being face-to-face around a meal is actually a radical context for discipleship, I think. I think those are formal dangers, and I think the dangers in terms of content is most of the dangers I'm most concerned about are formal. The dangers in terms of content, I think the principal danger, there's many, is pornography.

It is unprecedented pornographic world, and the combination of pornography and privacy and no cost is, I think, we have yet to see the impact of that on a whole generation worldwide. And I think that's... So I think there's a certain kind of ebullience for many evangelicals, a certain kind of optimism and gung-ho.

We always want to use the latest tools to communicate the gospel, and that's fantastic. And that's been true from earliest days. But I think we have to be very intelligent and thoughtful about discipleship in this environment, and what it means for people to be formed in this environment. And I think these are early days.

As a historian, I have to say, these are pretty early days. And I think I'm optimistic that the wisdom of the Church, the wisdom of Christian people, that we will find ways to live. This is God's world, and the Internet, nothing about this surprised God. And God is present in the digital world, and He will redeem this world.

And people will be able to act redemptively in this context. But I think these are early days for discovering what wisdom looks like. Yeah, those are wise words of counsel as we navigate these uncharted waters. Thank you, Dr. Hyde and Marsh. And of course, all of this raises the question over how we strategically get away from the distractions, what we could call technology fasting from our iPhones.

Bruce, I want to ask you for your thoughts on this on Monday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a wonderful weekend.