Technology and Media

Philippians 4:8 is often read as gentle advice to think nice thoughts. In context it is something stronger. Paul is in chains (Philippians 1:13). He has rivals who preach Christ out of envy (1:15). The church he loves is troubled by quarrels (4:2). And from that place he tells the believers to rejoice, to pray instead of being anxious, and then to think on whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable. The verb, logizomai, means to reckon or count: the deliberate, repeated weighing of something until it shapes how you see. Paul is describing a discipline of attention, and he promises that the God of peace will be with those who practise it (4:9).

Notice two things about his list. First, it is not narrowly religious. Several of its words, including arete, excellence or virtue, were the common moral vocabulary of Greek philosophy. Paul is telling believers that whatever is genuinely good, wherever it is found, belongs to God and is worth their attention. A Christian need not fear or avoid everything made outside the church. Second, the list is a filter. To dwell on what is true is to refuse to dwell on what is false; to dwell on what is pure is to turn from what is impure. The psalmist prays it directly: Turn my eyes away from worthless things; revive me with Your word (Psalm 119:37).

Scripture consistently teaches that people become like what they give their attention and trust to. Of the idols made by human hands, the psalm says: Those who make them become like them, as do all who trust in them (Psalm 115:8). Jesus taught that the eye is the lamp of the body (Matthew 6:22). Proverbs observes that the eyes of man are never satisfied (Proverbs 27:20). These texts were written long before screens, but they describe exactly the dynamic that the modern media economy depends on. A great deal of what appears on a phone is designed, by people paid to do it, to hold attention as long as possible, because attention is what is sold to advertisers. The Christian question is not only whether a particular thing on the screen is sinful. It is what the habit of looking is making of us.

Christians have long agreed that human making is a gift. Tubal-cain is named in Genesis as a forger of every implement of bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22). Bezalel, who built the tabernacle, was filled with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of craftsmanship (Exodus 31:3). The command to fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28) has been read as a mandate for culture, including tools. Printing carried the Reformation, radio and cassettes carried the gospel to unreached peoples, and mobile phones now carry the Bible, in hundreds of languages, into places no printed Bible could reach. This course itself reaches most of its students by phone. No serious Christian ethic of technology can begin by despising it.

But Christians disagree about how to think about tools, and both views have able defenders. The first view is that tools are morally neutral, and what matters is how we use them. A knife can heal in a surgeon's hand or kill in a murderer's; a phone can carry a sermon or a lie. On this view the Christian task is to use every new tool for good ends and to refuse its evil uses. Its defenders argue that this is what the church has always done with new media, and that fear of new technology has repeatedly proved foolish: the same warnings were once made about printed books and novels.

The second view is that tools are not neutral, because they form the people who use them. The Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan, a Catholic, argued in Understanding Media (1964) that the medium is the message: the form of a medium changes people more than its content does. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), argued that television had turned public life, including religion, into entertainment, because television can only show what entertains. The French Protestant thinker Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society (first published in French in 1954), warned that modern technique tends to become an end in itself, reshaping every area of life around efficiency. Writers such as Andy Crouch, in The Tech-Wise Family (2017), and Tony Reinke, in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (2017), have applied this view to the smartphone, arguing that its constant availability reshapes attention, rest, relationships and prayer whatever we happen to use it for. Those who hold the first view answer that this can slide into a fatalism that forgets human choice. Plato has Socrates warn, in the Phaedrus, that writing would weaken memory, yet the church became a people of the book and was not ruined by it. Defenders of the second view reply that they do not deny choice; they say only that choosing well requires knowing what a tool is doing to us, and that the church learned to read well precisely by forming habits around the book.

There is also an honest empirical debate. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation (2024), argued that the arrival of smartphones and social media in childhood around 2010 to 2015 was a major cause of rising anxiety and depression among teenagers in several Western countries, and called for phone-free schools and later access to social media. Other researchers, including the psychologist Candice Odgers in a widely read review in the journal Nature (2024), have answered that the evidence is mostly correlational and does not show that phones caused the rise. Christians do not have to settle that research to act wisely. Whatever it finally shows, children need limits, sleep, real friendships and adults who pay attention to them, and scripture has always taught that rest and solitude are needed: Jesus himself went out to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35), and told his disciples to come with him to a solitary place and rest for a while (Mark 6:31).

One use of the phone deserves a pastor's particular attention in many countries: betting. In much of Africa and elsewhere, sports betting and other gambling apps have spread quickly, advertised everywhere, linked directly to mobile money, and aimed especially at young men with little work and great hopes. Pastors report members losing school fees, rent and loans, and some young people falling into debts they cannot repay. Christians differ on whether every small wager is sin, and this lesson does not settle that question. But the pattern the apps are built on is one scripture describes plainly. Those who want to be rich, however, fall into temptation and become ensnared by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction (1 Timothy 6:9). Proverbs sets the slow way against the quick one: Dishonest wealth will dwindle, but what is earned through hard work will be multiplied (Proverbs 13:11). A phone that offers riches with one touch is offering exactly what Paul warned against, and a church that talks about phones should talk about this.

This section will speak plainly and without any sexual detail. Pornography is one of the most widespread and destructive uses of the phone, and it touches church members, including leaders, in every part of the world where phones are found. On its wrongness the historic churches agree. Jesus said, anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28). Job made a covenant with his eyes (Job 31:1). The psalmist said, I will set no worthless thing before my eyes (Psalm 101:3). Pornography trains a person to treat other human beings, made in the image of God, as objects for use. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant teaching all hold it to be sin, and while some secular writers defend it as harmless entertainment between consenting adults, no historic Christian tradition accepts that view.

Its harms reach far beyond the person who looks. It damages marriages, often deeply, and the spouse who discovers it may feel betrayed as if by adultery. It forms young people's ideas of love and of the other sex before they have any experience of their own, and many children first see it accidentally, on a phone, long before they are ready. And many of the people who appear in it are exploited, coerced or trafficked, so that viewing it can make a person a customer of the very evils described in the previous lesson. Material involving children is a grave crime everywhere; if anyone in the church is found to have it or to have made it, it must be reported to the authorities, as the Pastoral Care lesson Protecting the Vulnerable explains.

Christians who agree it is sin differ, in good faith, about how best to help those caught in it. Some Christian counsellors speak of it as an addiction, and use recovery groups and methods drawn from addiction treatment, arguing that the habit changes the brain's patterns of reward and that people need structured help to break free. In 2019 the World Health Organization's classification of diseases added compulsive sexual behaviour disorder as a recognised condition, though it is classed as a disorder of impulse control rather than an addiction. Others, including many in the biblical counselling movement, prefer to speak of it as a sin of disordered desire and worship, warning that addiction language can make a person feel helpless or excuse him from responsibility, and that the deepest cure is a new love for Christ. Most wise pastors use something of both: they take seriously how strong the habit is, and they call the person to repentance and hope in the gospel. The Pastoral Care lesson Addiction and Recovery sets out how to walk with someone through a habit that has taken hold, whether pornography, betting or anything else.

Whatever the language, some things help. Secrecy feeds the habit, and confession weakens it: confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed (James 5:16). A trusted, same-sex friend or mentor who asks honest questions regularly can do more than any rule. Practical barriers matter too: filters, keeping phones out of bedrooms at night, and avoiding the times and places where the temptation is strongest. Above all, the person must hear the gospel, not only the law. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Shame drives people into hiding; grace brings them into the light. A church that only condemns will never hear the confessions it most needs to hear.

Artificial intelligence, especially systems that produce text, images and speech on request, has spread faster than almost any technology before it. This course should say honestly that it uses such a system: the tutor that answers students' questions is an AI. That is one reason students need to think clearly about what these systems are and are not. They are tools that predict likely words and images from vast amounts of human writing. They can be very useful: for translation, for explaining difficult material, for helping people with little access to books. They can also be confidently wrong, they can invent sources that do not exist, and they can produce false images and voices of real people that are almost impossible to tell from the real thing. Habakkuk's description of an idol as an image, a teacher of lies (Habakkuk 2:18), is a sobering phrase to hold beside a machine that can produce convincing falsehoods on request.

Christian responses have begun to take shape. In 2019 the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention published Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles, affirming that AI is a tool to be used for human flourishing and that it must never be treated as having the dignity of a human being made in God's image. In January 2025 the Vatican published a document called Antiqua et Nova, on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, which warns against confusing the two and insists that moral responsibility always remains with human persons. Christians differ on emphasis. Some are hopeful, seeing in these tools a way to speed Bible translation, spread theological education and serve the poor. Others are more cautious, warning that outsourcing thinking, writing and even prayer to a machine will weaken the very capacities God gave us, and that power over these systems is concentrated in a few large companies and governments. Both groups agree that a machine is not a person and must not be trusted as God.

For preachers and students, the questions are practical. Is it honest to preach a sermon written by a machine and present it as your own? Lesson 3 of this module applies directly: if your congregation believes the words come from your own study and prayer, presenting a machine's words as yours is a kind of deception. Many pastors use AI to check facts, suggest structures or explain hard passages, and then do the work of study, prayer and writing themselves. Whatever you use, check every fact, every quotation and every Bible reference against the source, because these systems invent quotations. And remember that the purpose of study is not only to produce a sermon but to form the preacher.

Surveillance is the other side of the same technology. Phones record where people go, whom they contact and what they search. Companies use this to sell advertising, and governments can use it to monitor citizens. Scripture teaches that nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight (Hebrews 4:13), but that is a comfort because God is good and just; the same knowledge in the hands of a hostile government is a danger. Christians differ on how much monitoring a state may rightly do for security, since Romans 13 gives it a real duty to restrain evil, and how much privacy belongs to persons and families. For believers in hostile settings, the first lesson of this module applies: be as shrewd as snakes (Matthew 10:16). Do not store lists of believers or meeting places on phones; be careful with photographs and locations; learn which messaging tools in your country are safer; and never put another believer at risk by what you post.

The same standards of speech that govern a Christian's tongue govern his thumbs. Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building up the one in need (Ephesians 4:29). Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone (Colossians 4:6). Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger (James 1:19). Online, where people speak to strangers they will never meet and where anger is rewarded with attention, these commands are harder to keep and more needed. A servant of the Lord must not be quarrelsome, but must be kind to everyone (2 Timothy 2:24). A Christian who wins every argument in a comment thread and loses his gentleness has lost.

Online life also invites a particular kind of hypocrisy: righteousness performed for an audience. Jesus warned, Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them (Matthew 6:1). Posting pictures of one's generosity, one's prayers or one's ministry can serve the gospel; it can also become a way of being seen. The test is the one Jesus gave: whether you would do the same thing in the inner room with the door shut, where your Father sees what is done in secret (Matthew 6:6).

And online witness can be real and good. A pastor's daily short reflection on scripture, shared in a church group, may reach more people than his Sunday sermon. A believer who answers questions about the faith patiently and honestly online may be the only Christian voice some people ever hear. A church that uses its phone groups to share prayer needs, care for the sick and coordinate help for the poor is using a new tool for the oldest Christian work. Philippians 4:8 can be the test of what we post as well as what we look at: is it true, honourable, right, pure, lovely, admirable?

Open your casebook to a fresh page and head it Technology and Media. Write no names of people and nothing sexual. Step one. Write down the result of the Why it matters question at the start of this lesson: roughly how your time on your phone or other screens was divided last week. Step two. Write which of the two views in section 2 seems truer to your own experience: that your phone is a neutral tool you use for good or ill, or that it is shaping you whatever you use it for. Give one reason.

Step three. Choose one moral question about technology from your own church or community and describe it in general terms. It might be children's access to phones, false messages in church groups, whether pastors may use AI to write sermons, how believers in your setting can stay safe from surveillance, or how your church helps people caught in pornography without shaming them. Step four. Work it with the texts in this lesson: Philippians 4:8, Psalm 115:8, Matthew 6:22, Ephesians 4:29, and the cautions in section 4. Write what you think faithfulness requires and what Christians in your setting might disagree about.

Step five. Make one change this week and write it down: a time each day when your phone is put away and you pray or read scripture instead; a rule for your household about phones at night; or a commitment to check before forwarding. At the end of the week, write whether you kept it. Keep this page with the others. With this lesson you have finished the module, and your casebook now has pages on church and state, ethnicity, truth, protection and technology to draw on when you write your final case study.