Why Are Relationships Thin in the Digital Age?

00:00:00.000 | This week we are joined on the Ask Pastor John podcast with Dr. Richard Lentz, who is

00:00:09.480 | the author of a fascinating book that releases this winter titled Identity and Idolatry,

00:00:15.120 | the image of God and its inversion. It's published in Don Carson's series, New Studies

00:00:19.580 | in Biblical Theology. And Dr. Lentz, as you mentioned earlier, connecting with others

00:00:23.960 | in community is essential for us to understand who we are. By definition, our identity must

00:00:29.960 | be found outside of us. And we talked about this on Monday in episode number 674. So what

00:00:36.160 | do our digital communities offer us or not offer us by way of discovering who we really

00:00:42.120 | are?

00:00:43.120 | Yeah, I think we're a little early in the revolution to know for sure. There's surely

00:00:47.200 | enough hints that tell us the relationships that are simply digital relationships online

00:00:54.880 | are pretty thin and not substantive. Now, that's not always the case. And I want to

00:01:01.800 | be careful that we don't overgeneralize here. But broadly speaking, the sheer number of

00:01:10.840 | relationships that we are given and granted access to by virtue of living in the digital

00:01:16.880 | age means that none of them can be very thick. None of them can be very rich, the result

00:01:23.760 | of which we live on the surface of each other's lives. And so there was a season probably,

00:01:31.160 | I want to say, five, seven years ago, where we thought Facebook would eventually be replaced.

00:01:39.000 | Those that had grown up with Facebook were beginning to recognize that it was all about

00:01:44.320 | image and impression and very thin slices of other people's lives. The strange thing

00:01:51.400 | is that it actually hasn't gone away. It actually has mutated and migrated and that

00:01:58.680 | people at different ends of the age spectrum, the grandparent stage, as well as the teenager

00:02:06.120 | stage are even more addicted to it, the statistics suggest. So what we recognize is that living

00:02:12.760 | on the surface of our lives can be very attractive because it appears not to be very costly.

00:02:20.100 | We don't really have to wrestle with the deep things, but it's also deeply unsatisfying.

00:02:25.240 | So we're always expecting something more. And like an idol that doesn't deliver on

00:02:32.600 | its promises, we, instead of abandoning the idol, actually keep going back to it, hoping

00:02:39.120 | that it will give us more. And so there is this, again, critical exchange that takes

00:02:45.280 | place between ourselves and the world around us. We keep yearning for it to deliver something

00:02:50.640 | it can't deliver. And so rather than returning to the living God as the source of our safety

00:02:57.520 | and our security, we keep going back and asking the idol to do more for us. And so, again,

00:03:04.160 | I want to be cautious of saying Facebook is somehow evil, that our smartphones are fundamentally

00:03:11.040 | destructive. It's the dynamic that we allow them to play that is more nearly my concern.

00:03:19.360 | Yeah, that's a really good caution. And yet so much of life online is crafting and preserving

00:03:24.960 | a reputation of ourselves. We offer the online world an edited version of ourselves. So how

00:03:30.680 | does this relate to idolatry and identity?

00:03:34.240 | Yeah, that's a what a great question. How do we create identities? Most of us are aware

00:03:43.080 | of this dynamic of creating an impression, a reputation. We are acutely aware in our

00:03:51.760 | cultural context of what other people think of us. We compare ourselves to others. I think

00:03:58.880 | that's always been true. But this speed with which that takes place in our lives is enormously

00:04:07.440 | faster than it once was. So we are aware how fragile, therefore, our identity is if we

00:04:15.360 | are constantly comparing ourselves to a changing world, to changing relationships, to not simply

00:04:23.880 | a finite set of friends, but to a virtually infinite set of acquaintances online. And

00:04:32.920 | there's always somebody that's going to do something better than what you can do. I don't

00:04:38.240 | care what it is, there's always somebody. And therefore, if that's the comparison, you're

00:04:44.480 | always going to have some sense of insecurity. And the question is, how do you deal with

00:04:50.080 | those insecurities? How do you deal with that sense of safety? And I think it's not a dilemma

00:04:58.080 | here, let me sound as pessimistic as I can, that we're ever going to solve on this side

00:05:02.480 | of eternity. It's part of a fallen world. But the optimism here, and kind of heading

00:05:10.120 | towards the gospel now, is grace actually turns that dynamic upside down to its original,

00:05:19.680 | yet better form. And so the challenge of living in a online age is just the sheer rapidity,

00:05:30.720 | the overwhelming number of people that we can compare ourselves to, the number of impressions.

00:05:39.400 | And so we are as guilty of this as all the contemporary sociologists remind us in the

00:05:44.560 | evangelical world. We are, in fact, really good in the evangelical world of creating

00:05:49.920 | celebrities, creating impressions, creating images that are crafted and which undermine

00:06:00.000 | our senses of significance and security. So we want to be very careful, those of us who

00:06:07.040 | are oriented to the gospel, oriented to see God as the living God, we are also prone to

00:06:15.760 | our own forms of idolatry. Not uncommon, if you read the scriptures, that it is God's

00:06:24.440 | people that often come under the sharpest indictment of idolatry. And so we need to

00:06:31.680 | be careful as well that somehow the impression we give to people is that if you come to Jesus,

00:06:39.480 | if you reckon with your own brokenness, that that therefore will end this dynamic of idolatry.

00:06:47.840 | It doesn't. It surely reminds us that our Savior is not ourselves. It does lie outside

00:06:54.880 | of us.

00:06:55.880 | Yeah, that is true and sobering. Thank you, Dr. Lentz. And we have time for one more episode,

00:07:01.560 | and we need to turn towards gospel hope in the digital age, and we're going to do that

00:07:05.080 | more tomorrow. We've started in that direction, and we need to keep going. For everything

00:07:10.120 | you need to know about this series with Dr. Lentz or this podcast, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:07:15.400 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow.

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Why Are Relationships Thin in the Digital Age?

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