There is much about our current situation in the twenty-first century for which we are and should be thankful. We have technologies that allow for communication, travel, comfort, health, and luxury to a degree never before seen in the world. These are blessings from God, and we are thankful for them.
With our new technologies (and technology seems central to each of these features of our life and culture), however, has come a degree of anxiety. Many thoughtful people have recognized a danger in our technological age. Their fear is that, rather than serving as a means to some greater end, technology will become the great end in itself. More specifically, our fear as Christians is that, rather than helping us to worship God, technology will become the object of our worship.
Christians and secular thinkers who have written about this problem have identified some parallel trends that “technopoly” will bring in its wake.1 Among them will be a widespread superficiality, a disregard for tradition, and an increasing materialism that will replace worship and religion.
As a response to these trends, I offer the following paraphrase of Habakkuk 3:17-18 from the Scottish Psalter of 1880. I hope that its words will pierce our superficial thinking and feeling; that it will remind us of the value of our Christian traditions of worship (especially the tradition of “singing Scripture”); and that it well help us to worship God as more valuable than any material goods.
