Scripture tells Christians that they are to be in the world but not of the world and church history has shown that a reoccurring problem is knowing at what point the believer crosses the line and becomes not only in the world but of it as well. Dr. Miller made some good points in his case that are worthy of contemplation, but as he addressed objections to his views, his responses increasingly become strained. The presentation of his message at some points during his theater comments is—as much as one can tell from reading the text and not seeing him live in the pulpit—one of reprimand and rebuke (if seen live, his mannerisms and tone of voice might have softened the words). Where Alexander emphasized comfort for Richmond and the nation as expressed in his Bible text regarding weeping, Miller’s passage rebuked the people in a difficult time.

Catastrophes redirect people from the temporal to the eternal. After 911, many confused, disconsolate, and mourning individuals who formerly had little thought of God went to churches seeking answers to their questions. God uses floods, fires, whirlwinds, earthquakes, and other major events to bring his people to faith in Christ. The fire in Richmond’s theater on December 26, 1811, killed over eighty people including Virginia’s governor and it injured many others. It was a horrifying blaze as the flames spread rapidly across dry wood and fabric, but the horror became tragic because people could not escape through the theater’s inadequate passages, a constricted stairway, and too few exit doors. Meredith Henne Baker’s The Richmond Theater Fire recounts the event in all its details; shows how Richmonders chose to memorialize the dead; and then tells how memory of the fire influenced the city and nation in subsequent years. Baker emphasizes how the nearly church-less city of Richmond harvested from its non-religious residents many that became Christians and seeded new congregations or were added to the few existing ones.
Baker recounts the post-fire ministries of Episcopalians, Baptists, and Methodists, and a good bit of the text is dedicated to three Presbyterian ministers that would become particularly important for American theological education. Archibald Alexander was at the time the minister of Pine Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and would in 1812 become the first professor of the Presbyterian seminary at Princeton. Samuel Miller was serving in a collegiate pastorate in New York with John Rodgers. Miller would be appointed Alexander’s colleague at Princeton in 1813. John Holt Rice, at the time pastoring rural congregations in Virginia, would soon become the minister of Richmond’s First Presbyterian Church and then in later years direct Union Seminary in Virginia through some difficult times to bring stability and prepare it for the future.
There were many sermons delivered across the nation following the fire other than those of Alexander, Miller, and Rice, some of them would relate the catastrophe to what were known as worldly amusements. Such amusements included social dancing, card playing, games of chance, and attending the theater, among others. Note that the theater in the era was not always considered a proper place for Christians because theaters could vary in propriety from base dives and gratuitous indecency to more acceptable forms such as the performance presented by Placide and Green Company of Charleston, South Carolina, in the Richmond theater the night of the fire. In the paragraphs that follow, I will look into the perspectives on the fire presented by three Presbyterian ministers considered in Baker’s book.
Alexander’s sermon was delivered in Pine Street Church in Philadelphia, and then published in a pamphlet titled, A Discourse Occasioned by the Burning of the Theatre in the City of Richmond, Virginia. His text was the second half of Romans 12:15, “Weep with them that weep.” After several pages of compassionate comments and encouragement directed to those in mourning, he transitioned into the subject of worldly amusements. Alexander expressed reluctance to broach the topic but since some had asked him to do so, he made a few comments that fill less than two pages. He did not target the theater in particular but worldly amusements in general commenting that they were “unfriendly to piety.” Then, he began an extended section pointing out the brevity of life, the importance of Christian commitment, the need to avoid temptation, and the requirement of heavenly minded thinking. The overall tone of the discourse is pastoral and Alexander is reserved in his comments about entertainment. His primary concern was to bring comfort to his listeners as they lived through the fire’s aftermath, challenge Christians to commit to better service for the Lord, and call the unbelieving to faith.
Samuel Miller delivered his sermon to a group of “young gentlemen” at their request. He was specifically asked to include in his discourse comments about theatrical entertainments. He was, like Alexander, reluctant to do so, but again like Alexander, he addressed the issue. The two verses he selected for exposition were Lamentations 2:1, 13.
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Written by C.R. Carmichael |
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
Arrogance is at the root of our problem, as pride arrives just in time to initiate the tragic fall (Proverbs 16:18). We may be technologically advanced, but it isn’t helping us if we wield our latest digital tools as weapons against God….Thankfully, all is not lost because God is still in control, the Spirit is still moving, and salvation is always near with the redeeming power of Jesus Christ—f we only have faith.

Understanding the Digital vs. the Analog
So what is meant by putting forth the metaphorical argument that “the Digital” of transhumanism is an evil and dangerous corruption of the righteous design of “the Analog” established by God for the fruitfulness of mankind?
Technically speaking, digitization is the process of converting analog information like an object, image, document, or signal into a computer-relatable language encoded with a mathematical combination of “ones and zeroes.” Though its primary function is to speedily generate and disseminate data, it has become a darling of transhumanists because digitization can also be used as a powerful tool to transplant reality and, according to journalist Gil Press, “encourage the replacement or augmentation of the physical with the virtual or online presence.”
Of course, the “physical” that they desire to replace is nothing less than the creation of God, which, in a rhetorical sense, is the “Analog” of God. This is so because long ago He spoke the world into existence and saw that everything He had made answered the plan which His eternal wisdom had conceived; and “Behold, it was very good” (Psalm 33:6-9; Genesis 1:31).
Why call it the Analog? Think of an analog watch built with a traditional clock face and hands. Back in the days before digital watches, it was just a “watch.” But now, to differentiate it from the digital display, we call the very first watch, “analog.” The name is an example of a retronym, which is defined as a word created to avoid confusion between older and newer types of creations, usually because of advancements in technology.
From a Biblical standpoint, therefore, the Analog can be broadly defined as the elemental state of the world as originally created by God (even after the “generation loss” caused by the Fall), and the Digital can be viewed as the latest attempt by man to improve upon or completely remake that original design by digitization or digitally-driven science and technology.
Today, most people would likely assume that the digital process is superior to the analog. But such is not always the case. In the area of sound recording, for example, many audiophiles will tell you that digitization has not served us well. As often reported by those who have ears to hear the difference, the digitized music presented in compact discs and streaming audio can generally sound compressed, lifeless, bass shy and synthetic; whereas analog from vinyl records and tapes has “a physicality and immediacy in the sound of musical instruments” that is “warm, airy, and much closer to a live performance.”
The public at large, in fact, seems to agree with this assessment. Worldwide sales of vinyl records have increased sharply in recent years as people everywhere have rediscovered their fondness for the analog listening experience which, as one audio engineer tells us, “feeds the soul” because it most faithfully captures the original signal and waveform of God.
Indeed, according to mathematician Katrina Morgan, there is a credible scientific reason for this perception. “Analog captures a physical process,” she explains, “whereas digital uses mathematics to reduce the process to finite bits of information. What, if anything, is lost in that reduction is difficult to pinpoint. But the limitations of math in replicating reality may factor in to the difference in listening experiences reported by so many vinyl lovers.”
If Morgan’s general assessment is correct, there is a real danger of corrupting reality when we try to copy it with a binary conversion process that is inherently limited and reductive. Is it not prudent, then, that we ask what other aspects of God’s “analog” world are not improved by digitization?
The Increasing Dissonance of the Digital
To put it plainly, human beings are not computerized robots; we are image-bearers of God formed from the earth and comprised of flesh, soul and spirit (Genesis 2:7; Zechariah 12:1; Matthew 26:41; 1 Thessalonians 5:23). While the Digital is nothing but a “hall of mirrors, deterministic, cold and sterile,” we as part of the Analog are “numinous, reverberative, warm and fertile.”
Can we not spiritually discern the important difference? Our earth and sea is vast and spacious and teeming with life, and it vibrates with His wisdom, eternal power and divine nature (Romans 1:20; Psalm 104:24-25). Did God not create the physical world with these nurturing properties so that mankind could “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28)?
Surely, this is why the Analog has a pleasing full-spectrum resonance, and the reason why we find that there is an increasing dissonance in the world when we blindly pursue a conversion to the Digital.
For decades, digitally-driven science and technology has been touted for their revolutionary capacity to usher in a new age of health and well-being, and yet in many ways our lives do not appear that much improved. Perhaps more than ever before, we are finding our highly-digitized world struggling with a malaise of the spirit, a strange wave of sicknesses, and the menacing advent of unexpected death. So why does it seem we are no longer truly thriving on this earth?
Statistically, we are in poorer overall health, despite amazing advancements in diagnostics, trauma medicine and other specialties. The CDC, in fact, has recently reported decreases in life expectancy and increases in obesity and drug overdose rates. Fertility rates have plummeted 50% over the last 70 years, post-pandemic deaths rates are up by 40%, and three million more people between the ages of 16-64 have been added to the U.S. disabled population in the last two years.
Even worse, our usually-resilient young people are now more prone to serious health problems. The incidence of cancer in people under 50 has increased around the world. Millennials have also noticed a spike in strokes among their peers, as 10% of U.S. victims are now under the age of 45. And the autism rate among American children (which back in 1970 only affected one in 10,000) has now dramatically risen to one in 36 (CDC).
Truth be told, something very strange is going on when public school systems are scrambling these days to provide more classroom space for the rising number of psychologically troubled or special-needs students.
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The Bible presents a complex view of reality and how modern political ideologies dismember parts of this complex reality, isolate them, and treat them as the whole. And it helps Christians to engage with liberalism, CRT, and other political ideologies in a way that doesn’t invest them with ultimate, messianic hope or allow them to become the uncontested and sovereign ideology of our souls.
Perhaps you saw the video. A woman stares down the lens of the camera, straight into our eyes. Her expression is weary, her tone angry. “How can you win?” she cries, with the air of a question she’s asked a thousand times. “You can’t. The game is fixed,” she answers. “So when they say, ‘Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’—it’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything.’”
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Kimberly Jones’s viral video gave voice to the anger and anguish felt by many black men and women in the United States and beyond. She spoke of a society rigged so that most black people cannot succeed—however hard they work and whatever the content of their character.
Though the assumptions and commitments informing this view of a systemically racist society go by multiple names, here I’ll use “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as a general term to capture the set of concerns. (To be clear, lamenting the presence of systemic racism does not necessarily make one a CRT proponent.)
When discussed in Christian circles, CRT is often explicitly or implicitly contrasted to a version of classical liberalism: not the liberalism of the liberal/conservative divide, but the liberalism of individual freedom, universal rights, and the importance of property propounded by thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. Some Christians, rightly sensitive to the problems of CRT, end up espousing a secular liberalism because it provides an off-the-shelf alternative. Others, whose education or life experience have primed them to see liberalism’s dangers, give a free pass to CRT as the go-to tool for addressing them.
But both reactions sell the Bible short, not by opposing it at every point but by isolating an aspect of its interconnected truth, distorting it, and making it into the whole truth. Many of today’s social and political pitched battles are staged between complementary biblical truths that have been dismembered, isolated, and opposed. This tragic and unnecessary spectacle characterizes much of the struggle between CRT and liberalism.
To be clear, my  aim in this article isn’t to keep score between these secular ideologies and pronounce which error is worse or which is more compatible with biblical Christianity. I simply aim to show how both reduce the complexity of biblical truth, often in symmetrical and opposite ways.
The Bible is not, of course, a book of secular political philosophy: it addresses ultimate realities and calls people to find eternal life in knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent (John 17:3). Nevertheless, the Bible does describe the world, human beings, and the flow of history in particular ways (in a forthcoming book I call them “figures”), and these ways have implications for how we think about political and social issues. So let’s consider the key biblical turning points of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation as a grid through which to compare CRT and liberalism to the biblical truth they both simplify and distort.