John Dyer holds a Phd from Durham university. He currently serves as the VP for Enrollment and Educational Technology and Assistant Professor of Theological Studies for Dallas Theological Seminary. He has also been a technology creator for more than 20 years, building tools for Apple, Microsoft, Harley Davidson, the Department of Defense, and Dallas's NPR affiliate, and his open source code is part of the WordPress core. He lives near Dallas, Texas, with his wife, and two children.
He joins me on the Pastor Writer podcast to discuss his new book, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture.
John Dyer holds a Phd from Durham university. He currently serves as the VP for Enrollment and Educational Technology and Assistant Professor of Theological Studies for Dallas Theological Seminary. He has also been a technology creator for more than 20 years, building tools for Apple, Microsoft, Harley Davidson, the Department of Defense, and Dallas's NPR affiliate, and his open source code is part of the WordPress core. He lives near Dallas, Texas, with his wife, and two children.
He joins me on the Pastor Writer podcast to discuss his new book, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture.
You're listening to episode 203 of the Pastor Writer podcast conversations on reading, writing and the Christian life. I'm your host, chase Replogel. I'm excited for today's conversation with John Dyer about his book People of the Screen. The truth is the way all of us are interacting with reading in general, but as well the Bible is changing. Most of us have Bible apps, audio books that we listen to, as well as the Bible and audio. I'm using software to study the Bible for sermons on Sundays.
Chase Replogle:John asks a simple question How does the fact that we're reading the Bible, interacting with the Bible, on a screen change the way that we're actually reading it? He explores that through an academic project that turned into this book, people of the Screen, and he joins me to talk not just about those technologies, but about how technology in general shapes faith, how technology that's still to come will change the way we're interacting with the Bible. It's a fascinating conversation, i think, obviously applicable to any of us who are reading scripture today. Hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Thanks for listening. Well, i'm excited to have John Dyer as a podcast guest today.
Chase Replogle:John Dyer holds a PhD from Durham University. He currently serves as the VP of enrollment and educational technology and assistant professor of theological studies for Dallas Theological Seminary. He's also been a technology creator for more than 20 years, building tools for Apple, microsoft, harley Davidson, the Department of Defense Dallas NPR affiliate and also contributed to open source code for wordpresscom Many may be familiar with. He lives in Dallas, texas, with his wife and two children, and he joins me today to talk about a new book he has out entitled People of the Screen how evangelicals created the digital Bible and how it shapes their reading of scripture. John, really a privilege and honored to have you on the podcast and excited for the conversation.
John Dyer:Yeah, it's going to be with the fellow techie pastor guy, so this is awesome.
Chase Replogle:I've alluded to it a few times on the podcast, but my background is actually in doing custom wordpress development and digital strategy, mostly with nonprofits education. So, yeah, i was excited to see some of your code, probably in WordPress core I've seen or at least utilize. So thanks for that contribution as well.
John Dyer:Yeah, absolutely.
Chase Replogle:Maybe a good place for us to start is I'd love to hear just a little bit more. You know, many people are these days working in tech. Many people are working within the church. Not many people overlap, although I think that number, as you write about in the book, is increasing. Maybe a little context and background for how you've sort of been on these, these dual tracks of both technology but also biblical study as well.
John Dyer:Yeah, sure. Well, you know, I grew up in a Christian home, so there was that part of it with my parents impressed upon me the importance of scripture, so I grew up with that kind of in the 80s and 90s. But also my dad would bring home computers And so I'd get to play around with them, and you know then all days where you put cards into them and get to play a little bit more on the inside. I never really thought of that as a career, though, and so, you know, i went to college for med school prep, and but I decided at some point that ministry was going to be a direction I would go. So, you know, in the early 2000s I was working as a youth pastor and I just didn't make it a lot. You know, it's $1,000 a month for the salary, so I needed to be bi-vocational and do something on the side, and I knew enough about web development to go get a job doing that, and so I kind of had these two parallel tracks of technology development and then ministry, and I eventually went to seminary and started helping the seminary do just some of the early websites and early social media and built out our learning management systems for, you know, online education. So I'm doing these two parallel tracks And for me the moment where they kind of actually collided wasn't in doing technology for ministry, but it was when a seminary professor really challenged me and said you know, one of the worst things you can do is to believe that technology is neutral.
John Dyer:And I thought, man, that's just exactly what I believe. I think just use it for good, not for bad, right, that's all you need to think about. And so that really set me off. You know, that just really bothered me, that statement, and made me think, man, i really need to think more reflectively about not just using technology for good and bad, but how does, even when I'm using it for good, how does it shape, you know, me individually and also my communities and society in general. And so I went off kind of setting that area And then, as I started to think about, you know, developing little Bible software projects on my own, you know, i thought, man, how is this not just going to accomplish a task but also change what people see and don't see? And so this is a question I've been interested in, both in my development world, like what I make, but also in my reflective world and what I think about what I make.
Chase Replogle:Yeah, it's really helpful. It's interesting how much it parallels. I come from a kind of print brand design background and then got into the web when, you know, in the early 2000s people kept asking, do you do build websites, do you build websites? until I eventually said yes and figured it out, which seemed more doable back then too. But I always thought that was something in ministry I would, i would sort of walk away from. It was like helping me through seminary and then eventually I'd just become a pastor.
Chase Replogle:But it's always existed as I've been bivocational and even as I've seen its value in being a writer and I sort of think basic HTML and CSS is kind of just a business skill for anybody these days, more than a specialty. But I am keenly aware too of the way that that our lives are changing because of technology, for good and bad. I've been having that conversation with people about AI as well too. That, like the internet, it'll be the best of times and the worst of times, in my opinion. The book itself when did this sort of interest, this area of exploration, for you? when did it come together into what's now the book? people at the screen.
John Dyer:Yeah, so about 2011, i had a book come out that was called From the Garden of the City and it's just a kind of theological primer on theology and technology, thinking about the biblical story and where technology shows up, how God cares about it but how it also is shaping us, sometimes in malforming us, sometimes forming us in great ways. And I started to teach a little bit about this and think, man, that's all good, that's theoretical theological stuff and that's good philosophical work. But I really wanted to delve into the data and think how can I really study what's actually happening and not just kind of pontificate about it but put some sociologically rigorous things behind it? And so I was beginning to look at PhD programs and Durham University over in England at the time had something called the Center for Digital Theology And so I thought, man, i'm going to do a project there and start talking with some professors and really came up with this idea of saying really simple research question of what happens when people read their Bibles on their phones. So I did that project as my doctoral work and then turn it into this particular book.
John Dyer:So again, my interest was sometimes we I kind of come from the evangelical background And sometimes evangelicals get to a certain point where they go man this phenomenon of evangelicalism. It's really interesting and strange and weird and beautiful, but also dark sometimes, and we almost want to self reflect and look at ourselves. And so this project was both looking at this industry that I'm interested in Bible software but also how does that reflect upon what an evangelical is and how we tend to approach the world and change?
Chase Replogle:I got a chance to read the book and really enjoyed it and found it fascinating. I mean, i was writing the niche for the reader because as you were going through software, i thought, well, i've used that, i own that.
Chase Replogle:I used that So it made perfect sense to me. But you also write in the book about how the church has always wrestled with these times of changes of technology. You write specifically about the going from a scroll to a codex, a book, and then, of course, the printing press and now digital technology. As you think back on how previous technologies have impacted the reading of the Bible, how does that contribute to how we're thinking about or processing those changes today as well?
John Dyer:Yeah, i mean that's such a great question. We could spend a whole podcast on this, but I'll just try to give a couple little highlights. It's that you know, when you see some of the stories in the Gospels where Jesus is going to open up a scroll and then he rolls over to a particular point in Isaiah or something like that, you know it's interesting to think about just a rack of scrolls over somewhere that you would pull one off of. It's also interesting to think that those scrolls really only existed inside the synagogue, so people didn't have their own personal copies of the scrolls at home. There was no verse numbers on them. So you know Jesus didn't have a favorite verse, right, it was something where you'd have to move around and find things. And so you know the navigation of the text is totally different. You know who owns it, where, what context. You get scripture and all that's so different.
John Dyer:And the early Christians you know they're writing letters. You know that's what we know what Paul's epistles are, and in those days if you wanted something to be really serious, like scripture, you'd put it on a scroll. But if something was a little more temporary, you would put it on paper, sheets of paper, and maybe bind a couple of those together, and so that's what they were using early on. And I think what we think started to happen was that, as you know, the writings in the New Testament start being circulated, people start wanting to put them together And you can't really fit much more than, like, maybe, a single book on a scroll, and even then some of these have to be split across multiple scrolls. So people wanted to collect these all together And there was this burgeoning technology called the Codex, which is the you know, just a handmade book where you take a bunch of sheets of paper and stick them all together, and what seemed to be happening was that one that's easier to navigate, to move around in, it's also easier to travel with, but it also gives a sense that this is the official collection, right, that these, these books are the official ones, and, if you think, the New Testament's about a third the size of the Old Testament or maybe even a little bit less than that, but that could all fit in one book, whereas you know, the whole Testament couldn't. So that first big shift of scrolls to to Codex is is all kinds of new technological features, but it also does this thing where it says we're a people of the book And we're people of these particular books inside of this one book. So that's the way it exists for a long time.
John Dyer:But again, you know, that's really only in a church. So a Bible is not something that you would have in a home, and so the printing press starts to make that more possible, where books can be something that individuals own. And that doesn't happen right away. You know. So when, when Gutenberg first makes the printing press, it's almost a hundred years later, before Martin Luther and John Calvin and the whole Reformation happens, and there begins to be more popular versions in English and German and other kind of colloquial languages besides Latin and and and Greek and Hebrew. And so it takes until maybe the 1800s and 1900s where we start getting printing to be so cheap that every individual owns a Bible or maybe multiple ones.
John Dyer:And then we have this whole new proliferation world where we have, you know, the Teen Study Bible and we have the Women's Bible and the Cat Lover's Bible and all these really radically individualized Bibles.
John Dyer:And so, for all the benefits that we get out of print, we also have some that's very focused on you and your personal relationship with the Bible and not so much on the community's relationship with their words that they collectively have together.
John Dyer:And so now we're in this technological world of digital, which isn't any one thing right It's. It could be, you know, the desktop software, it could be the things that are in our pockets, that we hold, that we hold and we look up something quickly. It could be the audio Bibles that we listen to in the background on our Alexa or whatever it is. So the digital world is bringing kind of this proliferation, and it's unlike the previous ones where the codex replaced the scroll and the printing press replaced the handwritten codex. I don't see digital as replacing anything with print. I see it as something that's more of a multimedia experience where we have multiple things in front of us. We might have a printed Bible and we pull out our phone to look up a verse, or we go to the computer to do some deeper study, and I think that's the environment that we're going to be in for a while.
Chase Replogle:I do want to get in a moment to how reading these digital Bibles is impacting the way we consume the word or think about the word, but maybe more broadly just how it's impacting the trends of Bible reading in general. Maybe a little bit of the landscape of what the screen technology is contributing to Bible reading.
John Dyer:Yeah Well, i think you mentioned kind of the context. I think two other pieces of context are worth us noting. Is that some of this research I did, you know, previous to the pandemic, and so I think the pandemic, in many ways we would say, with church and technology, accelerated a lot of trends that were already there with online church and all of that. So there's already a big technological shift happening within the church anyway, and then at the same time, you know, in the US anyway, there's a real acceleration of what we'd call secularization. That has happened in Europe for a long time, where when people have a lot of, you know, resources and particularly technology, but also just food and democracy and all the other things, that you start to see a decrease in overall religious behavior and religious adherence specifically to churches, although people would still talk about being spiritual but not religious. You see a big trend in that.
John Dyer:So I think that that's part of the background is that you can't just separate one of these things from one another, and so when, when you're now reading on your phone, you're reading within a context of all the other apps that are on your phone and the idea of, you know, having a phone at all times and being connected, and maybe the way that you use it in your car for navigation, all that sort of tying into what we do.
John Dyer:And so I think what you're seeing is, you know, even 20 years ago, there was probably just starting to be more projectors and churches where people would put the scriptures up on the screen, and you saw an initial decrease in people bringing printed bibles to churches because they knew it would be on screen, and you saw a decrease in the number of, say, pew Bibles that just aren't as common anymore. So that was a shift that was happening, not on like that sort of Bible apps, but in the whole digital screen world that we've been in for now, you know, 30 years, something odd years. So those are the, the translating up to what we're talking about today, which would be more people reading their rivals on their phones.
Chase Replogle:One of the things you point out in the book is the particular role evangelicals have played in embracing new technologies. That's not just digital technology, but sort of throughout history, whether it's radio, television. What is it within evangelicalism that predisposes us to taking advantage of those new technologies as they emerge, and maybe so quickly that we don't fully understand what we're contributing to as well?
John Dyer:Yeah, that's a great question And I think, as I was doing this initial study work and trying to design the instruments I would use to study people, my British advisors as I was doing this work in, say, 2015, it was great And then all of a sudden in 2016, they said, hey, you can't just assume the definition of evangelical because there is so much happening in the US around the election at that time And trying to understand are evangelicals some type of actual religious category or they just a political category? And so that kind of set me off on this journey to think about how could I define evangelicals in a way that was The project got a lot more complicated at that point.
Chase Replogle:Yeah, exactly.
John Dyer:Yeah, i got a lot more complicated, and so part of it was that, yes, there are these doctrinal things, a real strong emphasis on the Bible that is somewhat distinct from not evangelicals, who also love the Bible, but just in sort of a different way than evangelicals do. But one of the things that seems to be consistent across the last 300 or 400 years, depending on where you draw the line of evangelicals, is that they're often It's a particular posture toward not just the scriptures and our faith, but also toward the cultural change which has been happening a ton in the last 300 or 400 years. And so there's sometimes a resistance to, but then also an appropriation of, because one of the other facets of evangelicalism is this deep desire to share the gospel and to figure out how we can do that in this new world. And so, while there's always a resistant party within evangelicalism, there's often those people that are very What I call hopeful, entrepreneurial pragmatism. What I mean by that is that hopeful kind of has to do with an orientation toward technology of. Hey, it may not be totally neutral, like I realized, there's going to be some formative effects, but all in all I'd rather use it than not use it. So let me go ahead and try that out. And then the entrepreneurial is religion in America was so different than Europe because in Europe you had state-funded religion, so you had tax dollars going to churches and building these wonderful cathedrals. You didn't have that in the US, so people had to figure it out. And so the American religion even not even Jolica religion is much more entrepreneurial and that's kind of baked into our DNA.
John Dyer:And the pragmatism could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending on the context. So pragmatism is sometimes saying, hey, let's not worry if we're Baptist or Methodist or Catholic, we don't need to worry about all these differences, let's just try to figure out can we get something done? And so you see this sometimes positively in something like the missions movement, but sometimes negatively when it comes to maybe some types of political arrangements. But when it comes to technology, it's kind of going well, let's evaluate this on whether or not it works. Let's try stuff and figure it out.
John Dyer:And so there is this contingent of folks that are always trying stuff. So there have been people trying online church or streaming church or something like that for a long time before everybody was forced to do it a couple of years ago, and so I think even Jolicles are doing this. Where they're looking at, they're seeing things changing in the world and they're going okay, you know, i'm going to try to figure out. Okay, this is partly scary, but I've got to take advantage of this for the gospel And I think that's what you're seeing in the Bible software movement.
Chase Replogle:Anybody who's interested in technology. I think part of what your book also does is it wrestles with how the development of technology, the funding of technology, is also impacting the technology that we're producing within evangelicalism. Maybe a couple of questions I had reading through the book. One of those is just how business models are impacting the kinds of Bibles that we end up with. A lot of the listeners on this podcast are writers. We talk a lot about writing. So certainly there's been past conversations about publishing and most people are aware publishing is a business with a few exceptions of nonprofit publishers. So there's always business questions sort of associated with these spiritual questions of what's getting published, and that's certainly also true when it comes to biblical technology. How does business intersect with the digital Bibles we're interacting with?
John Dyer:Yeah, so in the book I interviewed three main Bible software developers and one of them is Bible Gateway, so that's the kind of biggest website that you see a lot online. When you search it often comes up. And then you've got Logos Bible Software, which is now the parent company of Spathelife. That really is the biggest, most dominant desktop software that a lot of seminaries use and pastors use. And then Uversion, which is the most popular mobile app. So it kind of represents three major areas, from desktop software that was around before the internet, to the early internet, to mobile software.
John Dyer:An interesting thing is that each of those three has a different business model And when I interviewed these folks, these are deeply committed believers who really care about God's word. They care about God and they care about God's church, and so at the same time they've got to figure out how to make the model sustainable and workable, because there's a lot of websites and apps and those things that have come and gone and just haven't been able to be sustained. So anything I say about business sometimes can make it seem like some type of anti-business rant or something like that. That's not what I mean. It's just to understand how that may shape what's possible and impossible within that, and then how that would shape what the readers see and don't see in the text. So when it comes to desktop software, it's pretty much a direct sales thing. So Logos is selling their software and then selling content on the side of it, and so it's a much more direct, transactional kind of obvious model that we all would expect. So pricing and all that stuff has to happen. But then, when it comes to Bible Gateway, there is no direct transaction. What's happening is that it's based on ad sales. Now they've had a subscription model to have additional content, but that hasn't just generated a ton of additional interest, just like most websites struggle with subscription models. So the ad model really does change what you can do, and maybe you would incentivize certain choices over others. So we just got to need to take that into account.
John Dyer:And then with Hue version, there's neither of those things. There's nothing being sold and there's no ads in the product. So the way that's working is all through donor funding, and if you know something about donor funding, usually donors want to see the results. So they want to have some way to say is this money being used in a good way And is it making some type of impact. So that's that pragmatism part of it of saying how is this happening and what's on the other end.
John Dyer:And so Hue version produces metrics and shows how many app downloads and how many chapter reads and how many minutes of audio and all that kind of stuff. They're producing those signals And so it's interesting because there, with August, you can measure sales. It's just like that. I sell as much as I spent on employees and technology, whereas with Hue version they're always going to spend through it, but it's more. What was the result of that and how do I account for that with my donors?
John Dyer:So you see, sometimes that drives particular choices of what drives more engagement on Hue version. Well, hue version would say one of those main things is social things. So if you can get people to have friends on Hue version, they're much more likely to read more often because they're interacting with one another. And I think you would say, well, yeah, we should be interacting as a community around scripture And so that's actually like this good, self-reinforcing theological thing, and yet it also is drives what's on the homepage versus maybe opening on the Bible and different other choices like that. So I hope that gives just a quick overview of how the business model and maybe what types of choices those companies might make, come together.
Chase Replogle:Yeah, i think it absolutely does. The other. To layer on one more level of complexity there there's also the development choices. So if people aren't familiar, there's entirely different strategies and fields of thought on how you choose what to develop and how you'll develop it and which features get added and how you determine those features. And those are choices that anybody, from an application to an app on your phone, those developers, are making. What are new features we add? How do we decide which features to add? How do you see that development strategy impacting the products, the Bibles that we're using as well?
John Dyer:Yeah, i mean it's interesting to ask the different teams how do you go about that? And they would talk about different sources. Sometimes the input would be people submit data somewhere, like they put it through a feedback forum, or sometimes Logos would sit around with a bunch of pastors and just say what do you guys do, what does your work week look like And how do you spend it, and so they would think how could I help accelerate certain portions of that? So they're thinking about how do we develop features for the pastor to keep them engaged, whereas you were just doing a lot of metrics work and trying to say how are people doing this and what can I do to incentivize more? So is it more Bible reading plans or is it versus the day? Is that going to help them to share things which are going to bring more people into the app? And so sometimes they talk about just reading outside sources.
John Dyer:Looking at what's happening in the technology world, are we doing the menus on iPhone apps? Sometimes there's like the five icons on the bottom type menu, or there's what we would call the hamburger menu for a while, and there's some debate back and forth among the larger tech world and the designer world about which one of those things leads to better engagement. So it sometimes comes from the top down, sometimes comes from a business need, like, hey, we need to do this thing because it will drive something. Sometimes it comes from a user idea, sometimes it comes from a developer insight. But again, they're always trying to measure did this work? And what did this work means is going to be different.
Chase Replogle:But hang on, if you're reporting to shareholders or reporting to donors, Well, i think the big point you make so well in the book too, is even the language you're using right now can sound so normal and obvious that we don't think about it right. Everything in our life is menus, and everything in our life is apps and buttons. And so why wouldn't our Bibles be menus and apps and buttons and feature requests? And yet we have come and are coming further and further from that experience of sitting and listening to somebody read scriptures, as it might have happened in the Gospels. You write towards the end and the conclusion of the book that we make use the word awesome choices, which are weighty and monumental choices, both as developers but also as readers in how we consume the word of God. Maybe because I think that's what the book does so well. It takes these things that I think are assumptions for most of us and it raises them to the surface and forces us to realize we're making choices. Maybe a word about why those choices matter so much.
John Dyer:Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, i think sometimes sociologists tend to be very critical of evangelicals and I didn't want to just be dumping on us, on kind of my people, but to say, man, this is a huge responsibility And I think, as I spoke with most of the both business people and developers, i think they really get that And I think that they're really, for the most part, just really overjoyed that this is what they get to do with their life. They get to take this tech skill that they like and they get to do something that they feel like is impacting the kingdom of God and honoring God and what they do in a real tangible way. And so I think they really do take those things seriously and they're aware of these business model things and the constraints and just possibilities. And so I think just surfacing that and highlighting that was an important part of the book. I think us, as readers, we're a little less reflective on it. We're likely to have something in our mind about how technology is changing in some way, whether it's currently today, it's the AI trend, that's what is kind of in front of everybody But I think we're less likely to really reflect on what we're doing And one of the areas where I saw that is, as I asked people, i give them a little chart, kind of a little grid of, say, a printed Bible, a phone Bible, a tablet Bible or a desktop, and then ask them a bunch of different activities like devotional reading or long form reading or search or study, and kind of said, why don't you check the box on which tool you use for which thing?
John Dyer:What would happen is you could see these really big trends that are not that. I guess they're pretty obvious. You would think for a long form reading people really like print, or maybe even more for devotional reading, but for quick things they love their phones, and for search, they love their phones or they like to do more study on their desktop. So this all makes sense. People have a sense that one medium is better for a particular activity.
John Dyer:But then when you ask people what do you do when you're running out the door, they would often say to church or something like that, trying to get kids, or you're late or whatever, and say what Bible do you grab? And they would just describe what I would call the NAB version, the nearest available Bible, which is always their phone. And so you're going to gravitate toward the easiest thing without necessarily being reflective on how that choice of the easiest thing may affect what you do. And this is not to say the phone is bad. It's just that we don't really recognize what is the phone doing. So when we make that easy choice, we're not necessarily aware of what it's doing. And so I think this awesome choice of sometimes we just go along with whatever sort of is in the cultural flow, and right now that is having a phone in your pocket, and so we should be aware of what that phone in our pocket is doing.
Chase Replogle:I wondered, through your research, if you see and maybe it's through personal experience as well too the way in which using digital technology for biblical reading is actually changing the way we're interacting with the text. Are you having a? Because I think we all assume the words. are the words right? Yeah, i'm thinking about reading the words. Are we doing something different? Are we getting something different out of reading the Bible on our phone versus sitting down and reading it in a print Bible, versus maybe hearing it read within? a church service.
John Dyer:Yeah, i think those are all so good questions. Again, one of those ones that you could go forever on, but before I do digital, i just want to mention one other one was that in each era of technology we've added something or augmented the text in some way which has changed things. And in the print era, the big technological change we made was to add verse numbers. And so, remember, from Moses to Martin Luther, there were no verse numbers. So no one ever knew what John 3.16 was until someone put a 16 right there, and so that sort of like Twitterization of the Bible has had massive impacts on the way that we think about how we do theology, on what we memorize, what we don't memorize, what we pay attention to. So you kind of put that over on the side for a minute and you say, well, gosh, if print did that, if it divided up scripture into these little bite-sized t-shirt, bumper, sticker things, what is digital doing? And I think it's a little bit more subtle in some ways than that, and I would just mention kind of one of the interesting parts of the study that I think is helpful.
John Dyer:So I had a bunch of, i went to a bunch of different churches, went to kind of like some Sunday school type things And I would ask the group to read the book of Jude And I had, you know, half of them read in print and half of them read on their phones And I just had them use, you know, their own printed Bible, their own, whatever phone they had. So I'd have them read that. And then I would ask them some questions. Some of them were a little bit more, you know, factual questions And those are interesting to talk about, but it was really the interpretation and then spiritual feeling that they got that I think is worth, i think really illustrates this point of how things change. So when I ask them this question over and over again, what do you think Jude was about? And then I asked them also how did it make you feel to read it? There was this really crazy opposite interaction there. So when I asked them what it was about, the print reader said you know, this is about God's judgment. That would seem to be the consensus about what Jude was really trying to get at, whereas the phone reader said this is about God's faithfulness. I thought, man, that's really weird that they're seeing something different there. But then when I asked them how they felt it was almost this opposite reaction The print readers who said this is about God's judgment. They would often say that they felt really encouraged though, by reading this. But then when I asked the phone readers who said this is about God's faithfulness how they felt, they said they felt discouraged and confused and like they needed to read it again. So as a sociologist I go, man, okay, that's the data. That's really interesting. I need to highlight that. And then now I need to give an interpretation of what I think is happening, and here's my little interpretation of that.
John Dyer:I think what's happening here is that we're bringing sort of a bunch of associations with the medium of print and the medium of a phone, and those associations we bring them to the text without realizing it. So with print, maybe it's a little bit more old school and stodgy and maybe judgmental, but it's something that's also gives us a lot of confidence and a lot of surety and it has a lot of permanence. And so in that we maybe are queued to see a God who is in some ways judgmental and yet a God who we feel sure about, whereas with our phones we tend to associate that with one when we go on something like Instagram or TikTok or whatever. Most of the time the verses that are shared are mostly positive verses, right? So on Twitter, people don't usually put things about God's going to condemn the wicked and stuff like that. They usually put things about I can do all things, that Christ who strengthens me, or I know the plans I have for you. Those are the kinds of verses that we put on with flowery backgrounds and scenic landscapes and stuff like that.
John Dyer:So we're already queued to see a God who is largely positive and loves us, which is true. But we also associate with our phones all the kind of anxieties of our age, right, all the terrible things that we see in the news and all the FOMO we have when we go on social media and all the outrage and all that sort of stuff, and so the interaction when we use our phones for a little while. We just tend to feel a little bit discouraged on the other end of that, and so we bring that with us when we are reading the text. So again, god's word hasn't changed. Nothing about that is different And the apps aren't hiding anything from us, but we're queued in a particular direction, which I think does affect what we see and don't see in the text, and it's just important for us to be aware of those as we choose which medium we're going to use to encounter God and His word.
Chase Replogle:Yeah, that is really interesting. As a writer, one of the things I'm usually writing in Word on my laptop, right, So it's a digital format, And when I get really stuck or I'm just sort of feeling burnt out by something I'm working on, I've figured out that if I will print it out and just go sit in a different chair with a red pen, usually I immediately re-engage with what I'm working on and have new ideas, in that they're very different things which I think I sort of stumbled into realizing. It wasn't something I figured out, But it's interesting to think that we might do something similar. I mean, my phone everybody's phone is such turned into such a personal expression of who they are right Like.
Chase Replogle:I'm picked my phone up just now sitting here and my son and I have got a photo of us turkey hunting. When I pick it up And when I open it it's my calendar and my text messages and, you know, my social media that something of that personalization may impact the way I'm then opening the Bible app versus behind me as a bookshelf and every book on there has an author's name on the spine And when I pick it up, I know I'm interacting with someone else's words, that picking up a print Bible may actually there's a certain amount of sacredness we still associate with that print Bible that we might not get from the app. That's a really interesting observation.
John Dyer:Yeah, and it's this weird kind of inversion of what we consider to be sacred and secular, right, so sacred is always this thing that's set apart as more special, and so our printed Bible has that for us. And yet right now, probably the most, in a weird way, sacred object that we have is our phone. You know, most of us would freak out if we lost our phones. Right, that would be the most terrifying thing that could happen to us. So it's this interesting reversal of what we consider to be the most important object in our lives. It's a pretty big deal to us And yet it also can have a Bible inside of it at the same time.
Chase Replogle:I wonder, after all of your time with the study and interviews writing the book obviously a part of a dissertation did it change the way that you read your Bible? I mean, you've got kids, you're teaching students. Has it changed the way you're teaching people to read the Bible And has it changed the way you personally are interacting with the Bible?
John Dyer:Yeah, man, that's a great question. I think that you know I think about this a lot in terms of you know, you just gave that great example of switching mediums and being able to see something new, and I think that that's probably the thing I most take away from that is the need to make sure that I'm actively and intentionally changing what I'm doing, sometimes so that I don't miss something. Sometimes that's changing a version, which is really a lot easier to do in digital, to read it, read a different translation. And right now, what has actually come about for me in a project is that a couple of years ago, i made a little website called yallversioncom And what it does is all the places where the Greek and Hebrew make a distinction between you singular and you plural, but the English translations just have the word you for both singular and plural. I made a little website that just inserts the word y'all wherever there is a second person plural And you can change it regionally to YINs and you lot and all different regions of the world and how English is used. But that was just a kind of a funny project And I decided that I would actually work on a translation that had this in it, and so I've been spending a lot of time just kind of reading through the original languages for a while.
John Dyer:That I haven't done since my seminary days. So it's just an example of wanting to change things up and then think with my own kids about reading scripture together verbally which we don't do enough, and then also encouraging them to read and then talk about what we've read together so that we're not just kind of reading it but also having it penetrate more deeply. And then, when I think about just the overall world in general, we've gone from a time, maybe a couple hundred years ago, where people never had enough food and had to do all manual labor, to a world where the majority of people have too much food and don't do any physical activity, and so we've seen this real decline in our care for our bodies. That's, i think, the last couple of centuries, and I think in the last couple of decades we've really gone to this place of not having enough information. We never had access to it, and now we have access to kind of a gluttony of information. And so now we need to really care for our minds And if you want to be the kind of person that can run a marathon.
John Dyer:You have to do a lot of training to get yourself to become that kind of person, and I think if you want to be a person who not just has access to scripture but deeply knows scripture, you're going to have to do a lot of harder work. And when everything out there technologically is making things easier, sometimes you need to do harder things like memorize and study. And I think the ultimate question that we have in all of this is what kind of person do I want to become And how do I use my technology to move me in that direction instead of away from that direction?
Chase Replogle:You bring up, i think, good questions for the future as well too. So, as we've both alluded to, there is new emerging technology. Everybody's paying attention to AI, but there's certainly more to come. I think in my reading, ai is something like the internet. It'll probably end up touching everything in the same way. The internet's not just a brochure for a company on a web page. It's integrated into so many things, as AI is already becoming Through the study. has it helped you form ways of thinking or asking questions or processing new technologies that are to come to, and should we? as believers, how should we be thinking about our early adoption of those early technologies and how they're impacting our interaction with scripture?
John Dyer:Man, each of your questions is so good and so rich, so I know we're just scratching the surface, but yeah, when I think about the AI trend, you know, we know that AI has been around for a long time, all different forms of it, different types of intelligences that do different things.
Chase Replogle:And I always point out, your spellchecker in word is technically AI, so you've been using it, so yeah.
John Dyer:And any like breaks that were invented in the 70s are AI. Right, they're reacting to something in a way that you can't. But I think that the thing that's captured us is when this AI is doing the generative technology, whether it's the generating text or generating images, which those seemed like things that humans could only do, like we knew that computers could calculate faster than we did, but it just seems strange that they could sort of spit out information, and I think that this will be really helpful. I have a lot of fun with my seminary students in class, you know, bringing up, asking questions, and then we dialogue and dissect what it's seeing and what it's not seeing and what it brings in and what it's merging together. So I think there's a lot of just fun and joy and serendipity in the early stages. Then that kind of wears off a little bit and you're trying to figure out after that first few kind of delight things what is this really really useful for? And I think it's great at summarizing things and understanding them well.
John Dyer:Kind of what we used to do on Google is we'd search for something and we'd be looking for a website that had the answer, and we'd probably look at probably five or ten different websites and kind of collect an answer together What's doing that thing for us, which is great Again. On the other hand, if I was to say, like you know, hey, chat, gpt, can you summarize the message of Romans for me, you could probably do a good job. It's just that I want to be the kind of person that can do that thing right Now. I may not necessarily be the kind of person who wants to be able to make paintings, so using generative AI to do that, or to hire someone to do that, is still maybe something that I would want to do, but when it comes to my own, some parts of my own intellectual development, i still want to be able to do those things myself.
John Dyer:And so, just like I want to be able to run 10 miles even though I could drive a car 10 miles, i still have to train my body to get me 10 miles. I want to be able to train my mind so that I can make a summary of Romans and not have to be relying on the technology for it. So I think that this is the way I would approach it again is to say, man, there are places where I want technology to accelerate a thing that I don't want to do. And then there's other places where I want to be able to do a thing. I want to be the kind of person who can do a thing, and there's where I go hey, i'm going to back off from that part of it just so that I can keep developing myself, and so that's the way I would approach it individually, and then collectively, you know, trying to say what type of community do I want to have, and how do I help my community become that? through my use of technology.
Chase Replogle:Well, it certainly is not the end of the discussion. There are plenty more of these questions we're going to face individually The church I come back to your phrase the awesome choices that lay ahead of us. I think, hopefully, if our conversation today has done anything, it's helped people at least pay attention to the choices they are making, even often without recognizing they're making them, and we'll have plenty more in the days to come. I'm grateful for programs like Durham's that are trying to think this out through a theological lens, and certainly for the work you're doing as well too.
Chase Replogle:The book we've been describing is people of the screen, how evangelicals created the digital Bible and how it shapes their reading of scripture. And I think, if you listen, or you're like me, John Dyer, somebody I'm going to be following because I'm excited that he's already thinking ahead on some of these questions we're going to face. John, if people did want to keep up with the work you're doing, if they wanted to be able to follow future conversations, is there a place for them to be able to connect with you, to be able to pick up the book and maybe just follow along with the work you're doing in the future?
John Dyer:Oh yeah, so my personal website is just JHN, so my name's John, and if you just put J, a dot for the O and HN, just those three characters with a period in the middle, that's my website, jhn, and then that'll take you to things like a Bible Web app, a little website that you know you can do a lot of Bible study on, worshipai, where you can do early generative technology Bible reading plan generator, where you can make your own kind of calendar of Bible things. Take it to y'all version. A bunch of other things I'm working on on the development side. And then also, you know, books and writing more, not creating technology, but reflecting on technology. So I hope that. Yeah, jhn, i love to see you there.
Chase Replogle:Yeah Well, thank you so much. That work, i think, is so necessary, it's so needed And I'm excited God's raising up people and calling people with these weird matchup of skills like you. That's just what we need for the time that we're in and certainly going to be a big contributor to the future. So thanks again for the book and John for the great conversation and all of the links, as well as the site you mentioned. Your personal one will be in the show notes for listeners.
John Dyer:Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Chase Replogle:As always, you can find show notes for today's episode by going to pastorridercom. You'll find a link to the book that we discussed today, as well as information about John and his work. Also, if you haven't already consider subscribing to the podcast and there's more episodes to come You can find out about new episodes and perhaps take a moment to leave a review. You can do that wherever you listen to podcasts, either click one of the ratings or take a moment to write a short review. That feedback helps me to continue improving the show, As always. Thanks for listening Until next time.