Is ecclesiology downstream of technology?
Or a grand theory of all modern controversies around church authority
Over the holidays I managed to finish Digital Liturgies by
(whose Substack shares the title of the book). I plan to have a review out approximately whenever I feel like it, but hopefully soon. In wrestling with Samuel James’ central claims, I began reading more about the current state of the Internet, both here and in China, algorithms and machine learning, and on broader questions around the philosophy of technology use. Part of this exploration had me revisiting material by Mark Sayers and Alastair Roberts () on the history of small groups. The simplified story is that the Western church adapted to the shifts from the medieval world to the industrial one, which entailed the erosion of traditional spiritual formation in thick communities, by creating mediating institutions of discipleship groups or religious societies that often met during the middle of the week. We now think of these arrangements as community groups or small groups, but they were designed to solve problems that began to arise somewhere around the eighteenth century. In other words, long before critical scholarship raised persistent questions about the nature and structure of church authority, and long before watch bloggers lamented the rise of parachurch ministries, the technological shifts of society had already changed our ecclesiological structures.I like to synthesize ideas, and so my current theory is that we can use the way technology constrained and shaped church structures in the past to explain the current debates raging through American Christianity over other aspects of ecclesiology. I also think this sort of framework could help fill out Aaron Renn’s (
) negative world hypothesis, part of which states that Christianity began to be seen as a social negative sometime around 2014. Interestingly enough, this is also a date that writer and historian Matthew Continetti identified as a profound shift in trust in core institutions in America, “the last normal year in American politics.” It is entirely possible technological change explains the intuitive shift of Americans toward all core institutions, of which the church was just one of several.In the case of small groups, the technology of the industrial revolution constrained the range of possible ecclesial arrangements that were suitable to discipleship, particularly in the urban centers where life was significantly more transient. The automobile complicated the picture, making it easier for people at great distances to meet together while simultaneously reducing the costs for church members to engage in anti-social behavior or hold wrong beliefs. If a local church imposed discipline, wayward members could just get in their cars and go to another church on the other side of town. The world of church shrunk from an all-encompassing institution in the middle ages to a kind of voluntary Sunday association that met just a couple hours a week.
A more extreme example of these shifts might be Christians living in the surveillance state of China. Technology in this case constrains ecclesial structures so much that Christian leaders must either capitulate to the state and allow it to organize its structures and beliefs, and thus risk abandoning core principles of Christianity, or they must flee to illegal underground house churches that have little to no institutional structure or doctrinal cohesion.
While these might be classified as demands imposed by physical changes to family and work, the information age has added an additional layer of constraints on our internal horizons. There are various terms to describe these modes of thinking, but they generally entail a kind of expressive individualism where people are free to do what they will and that some or most inequality is due to structural forces. If you survey current Evangelical publishing, driven as it is by market trends, the most incendiary topic at the moment seems like the complementarian / egalitarianism debate. (A possible contender is deconstruction or dechurching, which is also a question of church authority.) While the debate isn’t new, I take its current prominence to be a sign of how much our theological conversations (or diatribes) are downstream of a secular framing, in this case questions of gender identity. This particular debate is part of that larger cluster of modern controversies all related to the authority of the church over matters of gender and sexuality, such as churches blessing gay marriages, whether to tolerate or accept (or even celebrate) abortion, and how churches should address singleness.
In contrast, there are almost no new major books or articles out debating transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, or whether churches should be ruled by elders or congregational vote, even though these kinds of issues are arguably more fundamental to church life. The oft recited “consensus of the early church” has always been a bit of an exaggeration, yet many of the modern questions we endlessly litigate had little to no purchase in the life of the early and medieval church. It is important to interrogate this disjunction. The standard retort, which fits so naturally with our Christianized tendency to valorize victimhood, is that the institutional church squashed all opposition to patriarchal, conservative views. But given that heretics regularly died for their beliefs, and we have a fairly reliable record of what they believed, there’s no evidence most or even all of the questions that preoccupy us were even live options. How many people in the Middle Ages died because they wanted priests to bless a polyamorous marriage?
If no one at all contested the issues now central to our modern ecclesial debates, one reason might be because the answers were self-evident. In the pre-modern world, men did virtually all fighting and leading because in a world governed by village farms, mountain herds, and physical battlefields, everyone knew that men were physically stronger. The shepherd was not the gentle worker depicted in the flannel boards of old, but a man who needed strength to fight off deadly predators and be able to lift sheep out of all kinds of physical harm. Comparisons of kings, prophets, elders, priests, or pastors to shepherds would have necessarily been male-coded. Marriage wasn’t always arranged, but it was certainly semi-arranged inasmuch as its goal was to cement social and economic bonds between families and was self-evidently the safest expression of sexuality in a world without birth control or antibiotics in which pregnancy very often led to death. While all the biological facts of the past remain true today—the average man is stronger than something like 99% of all women—technology has greatly eroded the salience of these facts. To take the most obvious example, the governing economic structures of Western society are no longer dependent on raw physical strength, which has been outsourced to an apparatus of firearms and spreadsheets. Many of us also work in office environments where men and women are equally capable of the tasks in front of them, including military operations such as drone piloting, and where the most obvious expression of sex difference is constrained to petty squabbles over the thermostat. On this measure, the digital age and its flattening, democratizing effects, are merely an extension of the industrial revolution’s deracination of humanity writ large.
If technological forces can shape the questions we ask, it should not be terribly surprising that Christians now debate previously settled questions like whether women should be pastors. These kinds of debates are not necessarily about whether someone is theologically conservative or liberal. My grandfather was one of the original signers of the Chicago Biblical Statement on Inerrancy. He was a conservative, Old Testament Bible scholar who taught at Wheaton. Yet he had no objection to his daughter studying to become an ordained minister. Though he had grown up on a farm with a horse and buggy, the technological world had flattened what was once hierarchical. What seemed impossible to a previous generation of Christians was entirely plausible to the next.
I’m already past the point where someone would like to know where I stand on these issues. I get it. All of us like to read people who agree with us. So let’s take the hot topic of the day so you can decide whether to return or not: I am not a hard complementarian. When I was younger, I used to be an outspoken egalitarian. However, I cannot quite get to egalitarianism anymore. I think the case for female deacons is fairly strong. I have no objection to women teaching Sunday school or reading the Word in service or leading worship. Clearly the book of Proverbs expects women to hold teaching roles. Yet I’m far less persuaded that Junia’s apostleship entails the same sort of apostleship Paul enjoyed—as far as I’m aware, though I welcome correction, no one in the early or medieval church concluded her “apostleship” entailed women as head pastors or ruling elders. Men like Chrysostom and Calvin acknowledged her existence while holding what today would be coded as “patriarchal” views of church authority. The Old and New Testaments, especially the actions of Christ appointing all male apostles at a time when he was subverting all manner of social and theological expectations, treat male leadership not as imperatives to be imposed on the church, but as the default, self-evident experience of God’s people. It is a case where the exception proves the rule. This mirrors secular leadership trends throughout the Western world, even in the digital age, so I’m open to this being an emergent property of our biological dispositions, something strongly suggested in Genesis with Adam depicted as the first priest.
Of course, I also know that these kinds of questions are generally settled by people’s intuitions and that so many of these debates are just some collection of raw vibes, supercilious putdowns, and tribal sorting. It’s a posture I’m all too familiar with, as it was my default mode of engaging the world when I was much younger and something I still occasionally have to repent of. As Joseph Minich argued in Bulwarks of Unbelief (my longer review here, a mercifully shorter one here), what we find intuitive with respect to belief in God is determined by the ambient intellectual and social structures that govern our lives. The same holds true for all sorts of beliefs. Sorting out positions against these intuitions takes time and, to use a well-worn word, privilege. If you have the resources, Robert Yarbrough’s commentary on 1 Timothy is one of the best treatments I’ve read on church leadership. But most people don’t have the resources to work through these problems and so I don’t blame people for arriving at conclusions that come naturally to them. Everyone does this.
There are several implications for all this. The most obvious is that we should temper our expectations around apologetics, public persuasion, church teaching, and friendship evangelism. We should be clear-eyed about the effectiveness our speech will have in these contexts on matters of church authority, even if there are plenty of times when we should speak to them. Arguments about how our churches should be structured will be heavily constrained by modern working and living conditions and by modern attitudes toward the differences (if any) between men and women, and the level of trust assigned to democratic processes.
Is ecclesiology downstream of technology? I’m open to the proposition, even if the affirmation entails the blackpill that few of the features I find necessary to healthy church life will be intuitive in Western society. Fighting an uphill battle is never pleasant, but there is never a reason to despair. Christianity has survived far worse.