I don’t think that the internet makes reading skills worse — in fact, as Crain reports, there are studies indicating a positive correlation between internet use and academic performance — but I think the internet does help us to understand just how poorly many people read. The key, I think, is that when we’re surfing the web we are in such close proximity to the tools of writing.

He continues:

I can only speak personally and anecdotally here, but it’s continually surprising to me how often people commenting on online articles or blog posts respond to something the author never said — in some cases never even came close to saying. People gather an impression from their reading, and then formulate a response based on that impression — but how often do they pause to test that impression, to re-read to discover whether the impression was right?

Speaking from my own experience, I’m certain the internet has made me a poorer reader.
The problem for me is not the proximity of tools for writing, as Jacobs suggests, but actually the foundational element of the web itself: the hyperlink. The basic way the web ties content together fundamentally interrupts content’s stream, and interrupts our concentration.

Look at it this way: Every hyperlink is a doorway, prompting readers to make a decision. Do we click, and see what lies beyond, forgetting what’s immediately at hand, or do we stay and finish what we started? Just when the imagination is whirring up, focusing in and blocking out distraction, the hyperlink offers a rabbit trail only a click away.

Just try reading this sentence and staying focused. The highlighted and underlined link has become a form of punctuation itself, but rather than giving further meaning to the current text, it can only become meaningful if the reader shifts attention to something else. Bolding or underlining letterforms used to provide emphasis or forcefulness to the meaning of a word in its larger context of the sentence or paragraph. But on the web, these symbols actually weaken the word and its surrounding context. The hyperlink fractures reading.

When I worked in the newspaper business, there was (and still is) a huge push to make papers more competitive with the web in their presentation and style. This meant shortening stories, printing bigger photos, moving a lot of news from traditional story presentations to punchier, bullet-point forms, shrinking page sizes, etc. (for a good example, see the Chicago Redeye). The papers assumed that the web (along with television) destroyed our ability to concentrate. Unfortunately, making this assumption means that newspapers are giving up the things that make them unique in the ranks of modern media: the long, engrossing story and the possibility of an uninterrupted read.

UPDATE: I realized I forgot to link to Alan Jacobs’ original piece. Error corrected!

Poor Kyle. He let me take this picture and now it’s on the internet.

In case any of his future employers google his name and somehow get this site (Good for him we don’t share a last name anymore) he’s a bright and creative young man. Don’t let the kitsch fool you.

From a quick search on the internet, I can tell you one thing: You’ve never seen anything like this. And somehow you’ve seen everything like this. It’s a smorgasborg of modern Christmas grandiosity, chock full of American Christmas touchstones familiar to anyone who has ever watched television between Thanksgiving and December 25. Cute kids in snow hats quote Linus’ best lines of scripture from the Charlie Brown special. The stage is bathed in a wintry blue and covered in swirling snowflakes. Attempts to hint at the current market for C.S. Lewis fantasy material are thrown in: Shots of a Big Ben-ish clock tower tolling Christmas morning, and scriptures projected on-screen in a typeface that matches the one used in the recent film version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Dancers descend from the ceiling on ropes of billowing cloth a la Cirque de Soleil, angels trade pithy remarks, and dance teams backflip across the stage. Those looking for something more traditionally small-church American get a Gospel number of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” And then there’s that guy playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra-style violin backed by squealing electric guitars. This is not your local church’s Christmas drama, but it probably takes a stab at representing it.

Actually, maybe it is your local church’s Christmas drama. The Willow Creek Association’s website–which sells Willow’s ministry materials to other churches–lists Imagine Christmas and its associated promotion DVD as the third and fourth top-selling items in their store ( see here). And a quick search on Youtube shows a bunch of our brothers and sisters in Christ are spending a lot of time trying to pull this thing off.

Church leaders are encouraged to purchase and produce Willow’s production, though the advice on method varies from “complete rip-off” to “do your own thing.” On this page, Willow declares that “Your Biggest Programming Decision of the Year Just Got Easier.” The package contains “everything your church needs to create an imaginative and highly-visual program or outreach event for the upcoming Christmas season,” and the site suggests that you may just want to “show it entirely on video.” On the same page, however, they encourage church leaders to “make a Christmas program that’s uniquely yours.” Willow leaders interviewed for the promotional trailer admonish purchasers to do something that fits the particulars of their community (and the size of their stage).

(As an aside, I have to chuckle at the thought of my own church performing Imagine: The altar guild ladies being lowered from the ceiling amid carol swells played by the hand-bell choir, the elderly couple with the hearing aids cringing to the wail of the guitar…)

The psychology behind the entire production is a plain example of consumer-driven church thinking. Bill Kinnon’s excellent post on Imagine quotes from the Chicago Tribune, which interviewed Willow’s PR rep, Susan Delay:

“In today’s world, the church must compete with movies and even restaurants for audiences. Everybody wants to be entertained. People who might not go to church might come to see a Christmas pageant, and if we can share Christ through this, then yeah!”

(I’ll leave any comments on church PR reps who end sentences in “then yeah!” for another time.)

I sound like a broken record for saying so, but the real shame here is that Willow Creek has assumed that the decline of American Christianity is a problem of attention span; that the solution is upping the ante with spectacles comparable or even larger than those the secular world offers. But this approach accepts without criticism the entire framework of marketing and American consumerism; that what we desire should be our foremost concern, that what we do with our time should satisfy our desires, and that we ought not feel guilty for any of it. Of course in all of this Willow is making an effort to communicate Gospel of Christ, but more now than ever before the medium is the message. What are the implications of communicating the Gospel in a way that is so much like the world’s anti-Gospel?

Please understand that my goal here is not to point out how so-and-so has done it better, or somehow say that Willow Creek is something other than part of the church. Certainly, the Holy Spirit uses even Imagine Christmas to give life. In the post I linked to above, Kinnon helpfully responded to a reader offended by his post, and it’s worth echoing the following:

I’m not sure who has said Willow is “bad for everyone.” The critique is primarily of the Consumer Church and how Willow is very much a part of that “style.”

It is pure pragmatism to suggest that because you became a Christian at Willow’s Imagine, and three family members prayed the prayer, that the spectacle of Imagine is beyond sincere criticism.

I became a Christian twenty-five years ago after watching a two person, one-act play based on Revelation 3:20. Someone I know became a Christian listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. On Christmas Eve, whilst we attended service in an Anglican Cathedral, my eldest son told me of a friend of his who became a Christian simply visiting such a place. In each situation, our Father drew us to himself. There are millions of stories of Christians coming to Christ in the oddest of ways. Because He worked in those situations does not mean that they are somehow anointed. (I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar hundreds of times as a teenager with little or no impact on my spiritual life.)

And as one commenter followed up:

Can we discuss the methods without invalidating the genuine things that God has done?

After all, this side of the resurrection, the church should be absolutely concerned about message and medium. God has promised to rescue his people, and I have no doubt he will do so even if Willow Creek merges with Starbucks, Joel Osteen becomes the next pope, and McDonald’s starts including N.T. Wright action figures in their Happy Meals. But the church is called to be a foretaste of a soon-coming kingdom, not of this world. Let’s spend some serious time talking, thinking, and praying about what recipe gives His people the truest flavor; all the fragrance, nuance and intensity of the supper of the marriage feast of the Lamb.

God chose the human race to be the priests of all creation, offering up creation’s worship to him and bringing his wise order to it. When humans sinned, God chose the nation of Israel to be the priests of the human race, offering up human praise and putting into operation God’s solution to the problem of sin. Israel herself, however, was sinful; God chose a family of priests (the sons of Aaron) to be priests to the nation of priests. The priests themselves failed in their task; God sent his own Son to be both priest and sacrifice. The inverted pyramid of priesthood gets narrower and narrower until it reaches one point, and the point is Jesus on the cross. The sacrifice of Jesus is the moment when the human race, in the person of a single man, offers itself fully to the creator.

- From his book, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship

“The essence of the righteousness of God is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name. And human righteousness is the same: the unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of God. (64)”

Piper’s statement is typical for his brand of thoroughly reformed theology, which sees God’s glory and sovereignty as the fundamental principal from which all time and history springs. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking often leaves Christ in the role of gatekeeper to God’s glory. In this model, the person and work of Christ is important because He allows us to get in line with God’s glory. God’s glory has become this disembodied thing, an other-worldly standard which must be maintained.

A better reading of scripture, in my mind, is to start with Christ first, then re-imagine ideas like glory and righteousness through Him. Re-read Piper’s statement on righteousness through the fulcrum point of the cross, he ends up a lot closer to Wright. It goes something like this:

• The essence of God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of His name.
• He accomplishes this only through the cross and resurrection.
• Throughout the New Testament, the cross and resurrection are explicitly for the life of the world.
• Therefore, God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold (and resurrect!) the life of the world.
• … and in Wright’s book, that’s pretty much the covenant.

Piper’s approach goes awry when it begins considering God’s glory as an object somehow separate from the communion of the Trinity. We’re headed for trouble any time we try to divorce an attribute of God from the person of Christ.

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? - (John 5)

This passage is foundational to a right understanding of Scripture, and particularly to a right understanding of the Law: A failure to believe in Christ is a failure to believe in the Law. And likewise, failure to believe in the Law is a failure to believe in Christ.

John the Baptist reviles the Pharisees with a similar remark:

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. - (Matthew 3)

I sat up straight in the pew this past Sunday when, after reading this scripture aloud, our pastor closed the reading with the standard declaration, “This is the Gospel of the Lord.” Somehow I’d fallen into a stupor. I’d forgot that the Gospel has edges this jagged. There’s an identifiable line of thought which says something along the lines of “We have Luther as our father…” Fruit in keeping with repentance? Winnowing fork? Baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire?

Christ-centered theology cannot be weak on the Law; to weaken the Law is to weaken Christ. If we are to put the cross and resurrection at the fulcrum point of our theological framework, we cannot forget why it had to be the cross, why it had to be blood, why it had to be the Son of God Himself.