The Stories of Babylon and Exile in Digital Babylon

Evangelicals desperately need to recover how the climax of the Old Testament shapes how we live for Christ today. Digital Babylon can help bridge that gap.

“a digital painting of the Ishtar gate in Babylon with citizens and sunlight”, DALL-E

You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!

For this week, I am going back to Digital Babylon - that is, I am going back to writing about what this Substack was originally created to write about. In 2021, I published a Breaking the Digital Spell episode entitled “On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon” (you can listen to the episode and read the manuscript here), and later put the podcast on hold so I could further research and develop that idea using this Substack. What I hope to do with this piece is “reset” my work on this subject, namely by describing the problem that I think my work on Digital Babylon can help address.

The Two Biggest Gaping Holes in our Discipleship

The tagline for Breaking the Digital Spell is/was “media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship”. My conviction is/was that you cannot look at a single issue in American evangelicalism or American Christianity today that does not have, at as a common root, a total and complete neglect of how we understand the content we create and consume and the context we create and consume that content in¹. 

But as I’ve progressed through my seminary education, I’ve now come to see there is a second gaping hole in our discipleship, and this one pertains to Scripture itself. That second gaping hole is that American evangelicalism, and American Christianity, has a woefully inadequate grasp of Old Testament history, specifically the history before, during, and after the Babylonian exile. What is quite literally at the center of the Jewish Tanak is obscured by the Greek/English order of our Old Testaments today, and as such, the centrality of the exile - both the events of the exile and the writings of the prophets concerning the exile - is completely obscured and lost to us today.

This is not to say that these books and events never get preached on or taught on in American Christianity today. However, when they do appear, it is usually for one of two reasons: to point to Christ as the fulfillment of all the types, shadows, and prophecies of the Old Testament (which is a good thing!) or as proof-texts for novel claims and teachings disconnected from the original meaning and context of the text (which is a bad thing!). Obviously, the latter use is just plainly unbiblical and erroneous false teaching, but with the former, the question needs to be asked: is pointing to Christ as the fulfillment of all the types, shadows, and prophecies of the Old Testament the only thing the Old Testament has to say to Christians today?

I would contend that is not the case. In fact, I would now contend that many of our discipleship issues stem around the fact that most Christians just do not understand the majority of the Old Testament, much less how it applies to their lives today.

Of course, some portions of the Old Testament get more attention than others. Outside of Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon, which are unequivocally the three most cited books of the Old Testament in American Christianity², books like Exodus, Joshua, and 1-2 Samuel get frequent mention because the exodus, the Jericho march, and David vs Goliath. There’s enough material to work with there without having to get your hands too dirty in difficult, confusing, or upsetting biblical history or contextual details.

But after Solomon’s death in 1 Kings, things get tricky, and anyone who has studied Old Testament history at length knows why: the kingdom divides. Now you have a book and a half with two concurrently running timelines of kings, events, and most importantly, entire prophetic books to now juggle to make sense of. To even tell the story of the Babylonian exile, you first have to get all the pieces of that story properly arranged so that people can clearly see the story to begin with³.

But even if one is willing to do the work to understand the causes, timelines, people, and places of the Babylonian exile, it doesn’t automatically answer the question: why does this matter to my life today? What does this historical event have anything to do with how to live faithfully for God today?

He Gave Us Stories

This question gets at the heart of the discipline of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, as defined by Richard L. Pratt Jr, is “the study of all that goes into interpreting the Bible.” This involves preparation (understanding the influences on the interpreter), investigation (determining the original meaning of OT narratives), and application (meaning to the modern audience).⁴ Hermeneutics is not just exegeting the meaning out of the text - it is also how you apply that exegeted text to the needs and context of your audience. As Pratt explains,

Jesus built his entire ministry on applying Scripture to his day, arguing tenaciously for the authority and applicability of the Old Testament. In a similar way, Paul informed Timothy that the Old Testament Scriptures are for every believer: “All scripture…is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” ( 2 Timothy 3:16). He also told the Roman Christians: "For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). To treat the Old Testament as a relic of the past with no significance for today contradicts the Bible's own treatment of the Old Testament. We must strive to know how these texts relate to the modern world⁵. (emphasis mine)

Of course, if you asked most conservative evangelicals today, they would readily agree that the Old Testament has significance for today - they would just likely caveat that some areas are more significant than others, and I would heartily agree⁶. The question becomes, then: which parts of the Old Testament are the most significant, and how would you know?

Well, if we are going off the original Hebrew order of the Old Testament, there is a very clear contender for first place: the events leading up to, during, and immediately after the Babylonian exile. It not only covers the largest amount of the Old Testament by volume, but you cannot properly understand an entire genre of Old Testament books - two of which are among the largest Old Testament books!⁷ - without understanding the context of the events in which the authors were writing! Is it any wonder that most Christians struggle to make sense of the Old Testament, or use it in incorrect ways, when the most significant event of the Old Testament (and its accompanying genre of books that take up the bulk of the Old Testament’s size) requires so much effort to even lay the groundwork for why Christians should care in the first place?

Mind you, this is not just a problem with the Babylonian exile - this is a major obstacle to the entire Old Testament. To quote Pratt again,

The complexities of applying Old Testament stories become pronounced when we move beyond the basics. For instance, how are we to apply a book like Kings, written to help the exiles maintain a hope of return, to modern Christians in the United States who have never been exiled? How do we take the book of Deuteronomy, written for Israelites about how to make war in Canaan, and apply to Christians involved in modern international politics? How should we appropriate Israel's celebration at the Red Sea when our "struggle is not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12)? Even if we have confidence that we understand the original meaning, it is difficult to extend that meaning into our world. We know these stories have something to say to us, but we know just as plainly that we live in a different world.⁸ (emphasis mine)

Until Christians desire to understand what theses stories have to say to us, in spite of the fact that we live in a different world, we will continue to neglect the whole counsel of God for his people today. The challenge is both teaching the basics of the Old Testament story, and one of applying the Old Testament story to Christians today.

And this is where Digital Babylon comes in.

Closing the Two Biggest Gaping Holes with Digital Babylon

Media literacy is one of the biggest gaping holes in our discipleship. Our understanding of the Old Testament stories is an equally large gaping hole. What I want to contend is that both holes can be closed together at the same time by showing how the most important event in the Old Testament directly speaks to one of the most pressing challenges of Christians today: living as faithful and obedient Christians under the shadow of Digital Babylon’s dominion of every aspect of our lives and culture - a place many of us do not want to live in, do not fully understand, and have good reason to be afraid of.

Pratt argues that the key to applying the Old Testament today is to build bridges between the Old Testament’s world and our world today:

Application of Old Testament narratives involve building bridges from the ancient world to our day; we seek to span the gulf between ourselves and the Bible. On one side of the historical gulf, we carefully investigate Scripture. We do our best to understand Old Testament stories in terms of the original settings. On the other side, we become aware of our own situation. We learn of needs and opportunities for the Word today. At times bridging the gap will be easy, at other times extremely difficult.⁹

Digital Babylon is one of those bridges. Digital Babylon refers to the sudden and rapid ascent of immensely powerful technology and media companies (an event), the cultural, political, and spiritual forces those companies and their tools/services exert on us individually and collectively (an empire), and the period of time where individuals, families, and churches must live as wise and faithful exiles amid God-ordained cultural and spiritual opposition (an epoch)¹⁰. All three of those categories come from the text of Scripture itself, and all three of those categories bridge the text to Scripture to our present lives. When taught along this framework, I believe bridging this gap between Babylon in the Old Testament and Digital Babylon in our lives today will be a natural and easy bridge to cross.

I originally began this Substack to chip away at this Digital Babylon idea, and an unexpected hiatus from the Substack turned into an opportunity to dedicate three months of part-time research and writing towards a book on the subject. My goal with this Substack going forward is to gradually chip away at this book’s completion. As it stands, I have roughly 80% of a rough draft manuscript, with a full outline of the remaining portions that need to be written. I am setting a hard goal for myself each week to publish something once a week. This is a habit and rhythm that I believe is good and necessary for me as a writer. Even if it’s a fraction of a thought, or a kernel of an idea, my goal is to progress a minimum of 1% a week towards the book’s completion. Additionally, I am aiming to have a rough draft in hand for proposing to publishers by the end of 2023. I emphasize rough draft, because this will absolutely need some serious editing and re-writes, but as an unestablished author I want to have a manuscript in hand as proof that this idea is worth investing in.

Of course, by publishing these snippets and works-in-progress here, my hope is that I will be able to get some good input and feedback from readers as well. It is a scary thing to invite such broad feedback during such a sensitive phase of the writing process, but I know that whatever feedback I receive will only sharpen my work. Not only that, but as Pratt says:

As strange as it may sound, the most practical commentary on Old Testament stories is contemporary life. It teaches us about people’s strengths and weaknesses, their beliefs and doubts, their priorities and concerns. Effective application requires that we know people. Personal involvement, magazines, books, television, popular music, movies, and the like are indispensable resources for effectively applying Old Testament narratives. If we are to bring Old Testament stories to modern life, we must give careful attention to the world in which we live. ¹¹

In other words: if I want ordinary Christians to discover the richness of the Old Testament and how it speaks to their lives today, I need to field-test these ideas with anyone I can, and this Substack is the most natural place to invite as much of that field-testing as I can.

At one point in his book, Pratt tells a story about how he and his wife were trying to clean out the clutter in their house. She asks him, “What’s the use in keeping these things if we’re not going to use them?” Pratt remarks that,

We have to ask the same question about Old Testament narratives. What’s the use in having them if we don’t use them? . . . . Unless we apply Old Testament stories to contemporary life, we have no reason to keep them.¹²

I am not arguing that we need to throw out the Old Testament, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most Christians have practically already done so. We not only need to keep these stories - we need to teach them, because they are just as urgently relevant as they ever have been.

Substack Chat for This Week: Your Favorite Old Testament Stories (and a Programming Note Going Forward)

Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. I admit that I don’t have a preview next week’s piece, simply because this piece took much longer to write than I had planned and I’m just barely getting it out the door. But, I have no shortage of material to write or revise, so there will be something here next week.

I am going to be tweaking how I do Substack Chat going forward as well. Instead of being a weekly question based on the piece, I intend to share things I am reading in Substack Chat more frequently and, if readers have good insights or comments, share those at the end of a post. That said, for this week’s Substack Chat, I want to know: what are your favorite Old Testament stories, and why? “Sunday School” answers count if you genuinely mean them. I’ve got my picks, but I want to hear yours!

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends or on your personal social media channels! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

Austin

1. My definition of media literacy is better described as “media literacy + media ecology”. Traditionally, the two have been separated, but I’ve argued (implicitly) that the traditional definition of media literacy is inadequate and that media ecology ought to belong to the definition of media literacy as well.

2. I don’t even need a study to cite that, it just seems plainly obvious.

3. Which, if I could rant for a second, is entirely a problem of our own making. The Greek order of the Old Testament, which is what we use today, is the sole source of this confusion, destroying and obfuscating what is very plainly laid out in the order of books in the original Hebrew order of the Old Testament. The Protestant Reformation recovered many critical doctrines of biblical Christianity that had been lost or obscured by Roman innovation, including a return to the correct canon of the Old Testament and an abandonment of Jewish apocrypha. But they did not go far enough in restoring the Old Testament to the original order of the books to the original Hebrew order. One can only wonder what might’ve been different had the Reformation gone all the way in restoring the Old Testament to the very order Jesus himself would’ve been familiar with!

4. These are the three points by which Pratt’s He Gave Us Stories: the Bible Student’s Guide to Interpreting Old Testament Narratives is organized.

5. Pratt, 14.

6. The perspicuity of Scripture is especially relevant here.

7. Isaiah and Jeremiah

8. Pratt, 16.

9. Pratt, 16.

10. This is the original definition of the Digital Babylon framework that I first posited a little over a year ago:

By the Glowing Shores of Digital Babylon, We Wept

11. Pratt, 314.

12. Pratt, 311.