Twice this spring, I was in New York City, and as always, the city filled me with awe.
Craning my neck at the skyscrapers, unable to fit some of them into a single photo, I remarked to a friend that the real marvel isn’t how high the buildings go but how deep their foundations must be to stand that tall. I arrived by plane: breakfast at home in Tennessee, lunch in the Big Apple. I got around by train, covering the length of the island in minutes.
We live in a world of technological wonders.
World We’ve Built
But what happens when technological advance outpaces our moral formation? We’re left barren. And that’s what I’m afraid is happening with recent developments in technology and generative AI.
Brandon Rickabaugh, writing for Comment, warns of a poverty of soul in technological abundance. Much of his article focuses on AI companionship and the way it depersonalizes us. But what got my attention was his account of how a technological mindset reshapes the way we think about spiritual disciplines.
When Persons Become Systems
Rickabaugh notes how we now describe ourselves with mechanistic metaphors. This is something I warned about last year, how we constantly talk about ourselves as if we were machines—a habit more pervasive than most of us realize. That’s why I’m less concerned about robots taking over the world than I am about humans beginning to mirror robots. Robots won’t conquer us from outside; we’ll start to act robotic ourselves and lose something of our humanity in the process.
Here’s where we need to consider spiritual formation, in particular how we view the disciplines and practices that often go along with growth. Count me in as someone who celebrates the many tools and techniques available for Bible reading, prayer, and cultivating community with others in church. (I’m developing prayer resources myself, such as The Lord Is My Light liturgy for daily prayer, in both podcast and book form.) I’m not against tools, and I’m certainly not against technique. I’m happy to talk about both.
But in a mechanistic mindset, spiritual formation shifts away from the steady ordering of the person through abiding in Christ (affecting our thoughts, emotions, desires, will, body, and social presence) and toward a self-improvement plan or behavioral or psychological upgrade.
Disciplines Are Not Deliverables
Rickabaugh defines spiritual disciplines as “embodied practices that help place us where grace can reach us in relational receptivity to God.” He gives examples: “Silence that interrupts self-talk. Solitude that exposes we are not as alone as we feel. Fasting that confronts our habits of control. Confession that breaks the tyranny of self-justification. Worship that directs desire toward God.”
But this isn’t a program that guarantees results. “Spiritual disciplines do not transform us into the image of Christ,” he says. “They create holy space. When practiced in faith, hope, and love, they help us become relationally receptive to the Spirit who does the actual renovating work. Our attention shifts from self-mastery and self-soothing to a self-surrender uninterested in manipulating outcomes.”
This is where the modern technological culture is so insidious, because it reframes our formation as self-help optimization. Spiritual disciplines get slotted into the long list of other steps that can be retooled for regulating our behavior and emotions. Their value is instrumental.
Silence becomes a stress-management strategy. Solitude becomes a productivity reset. Fasting becomes a wellness intervention. Prayer becomes mood regulation. These shifts mark a conceptual inversion: Spiritual practices become techniques for generating desired inner states rather than embodied invitations to divine encounter.
What’s missing in this is God. Or worse, God gets instrumentalized until he’s harnessed for whatever outcome we’re most interested in. In this world, we’ll be vulnerable to every new technology on offer—including the AI chatbot that promises spiritual direction—because we’re already thinking in terms of a programmable system. Taking that step will only further shift the aim of spiritual life “from communion to control, from surrender to self-curation, from transformation to experience management.”
Rickabaugh links this to another topic I’ve written on before—the role of friction and resistance in personal growth. We cannot remove all the difficulty from the path of spiritual formation because the resistance we face—internal and external—is part of the Spirit’s sharpening work in us.
Every effort to clear away difficulty blinds us to reality: The good we seek is meant to be formed in us as we seek it, not delivered on demand.
Our aim isn’t to achieve an inner equilibrium but to encounter the God who promises, within the context of the covenant community, to transform our character into Christlikeness. Rickabaugh concludes by pointing to the paradox of our moment:
Unprecedented technical power joined to pervasive confusion about how to live. Until knowledge of the soul returns and is applied, we will misread our problems and misuse our power. . . . Without the soul, the spiritual life collapses into techniques for emotional regulation, attention management, or self-optimization.
Re-Formation, Not Optimization
Where, then, do we go from here? He points to several aspects of re-formation:
- the necessity of interior personal presence (prayer, confession, and silence require an inner life of awareness and openness to God);
- a relational rather than mechanical vision of the Christian life;
- the disruptiveness of having our wills confronted by truth that calls us to repentance;
- the resistance that strengthens us and directs our growth toward spiritual maturity; and
- the indispensability of people, the communion of saints who walk this road with us as we seek the Lord together.
The technological world we’ve built is awe-inspiring. But techniques don’t make us more like Christ. It’s the Spirit who accomplishes spiritual formation through Scripture, through the disciplines, through the friction, and in community. Technology can get you to New York. But not to God.
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