This mission suggests exploring worship and identity in our technological age using writing and film to uncover issues at the collision of technology and ecology, art and iconoclasm, liturgy and conversion, and the Holy Spirit and economics.

The best example of the kind of experience we need is found in St. John's Revelation. After experiencing both the disrupting images of the true nature of the world and the scene in heaven, the church was thrown into ambiguity. How do we live in this world? They had to be willing to accept the full extent of the systems of evil, the distortion of God given image bearing, and antichrist nature of the world order, yet also walk in the hope of God’s present Kingdom that grows amidst suffering and is a beacon of life and good news to an oppressed world.

This is true today. No matter how confident or convinced the leaders of science, technology, or government are, deep down, we don’t know who we are and we don’t know where we’re going.

In the secularization of the West, the grand stories that once gave us purpose have become deeply mistrusted and in the vacuum of meaning, narratives of the systems of commerce, nation state, and the grand story of technological and social progress began to fill the sacred spaces of our hearts. Every day we live in the tension that we are more than just employees, consumers, or social security numbers, yet we suppress our desire for transcendence and fear to hope to be more.

Our increasingly technological society is constantly drawing us in to believe the narratives that the corporations, governments, and media need us to believe. They feed off of our attention, monetize our movements, and offer us powerful narratives about ourselves, the world, and their own importance. We are all followers of these great storytellers, though some followers are more reluctant than others.

When we accept and hold these narratives dear to us, we are named. These systems and powers offer us identities in their stories that are contrary to the deepest reality of ourselves, yet we allow them to use and exploit us by imprinting their images on our imaginations, and orienting us to their liturgies. We are fragmented and reduced to our value to these systems, often submitting to their brands, titles, or roles, and displaying their symbols in the form of logos, flags, style, or memes. We embrace these identities for security and belonging, not knowing that we are the true image, to be uplifted while adoring our creator. Yet out of fear, we abdicate our power and long to uplift something in our place.

"In Technopoly, the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted by commercial enterprise. This occurs not because corporate America is greedy but because the adoration of technology pre-empts the adoration of anything else. Symbols that draw their meaning from traditional religious or national contexts must therefore be made impotent as quickly as possible —that is, drained of sacred or even serious connotations. The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” applies as well to a technological divinity as any other.”

– Neil Postman, Technopoly (pg.137)

With this in perspective, the great temptation is iconoclasm, to abandon images, yet the story of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures view the aesthetics of images, symbols, and stories as central to the human and its culture. The decision falls upon us what images, symbols and stories we consider primary and which are temptations to abdication.

The Hebrew people believed that humans were to gain their identity from their Creator and find their context in the story he was telling. It was the Creator who said he made humans in his image, as symbols of God’s loving care. Humans were created to live in love with our good Creator and reflect him into the world that he has made. They were on a journey with the Creator who was redeeming his Creation through humans walking in love with him and each other, and redeeming time by weaving their lives into a story of meaning.

Do we remember, our name is icon?

This demands that we untangle our identities from the various systems and rulers and authorities that name us by drawing in our attention and shaping our desires around what it considers ultimate, be that the narrative of a corporation, a country, or a technology, that offers us a distinctive way to live in the world in harmony with its vision.

We are named when we or these powers and authorities manufacture and introduce to us identities that are beneficial to them in order to use us inside of their systems. These could be as implicit as luring our attention and implanting attractive images through advertising and explicit as job titles. These identities become problematic when they conform us to any identity that is lower than bearing the image of God as his icon of creative restoration through love truth, goodness, and hope in the world.

This is a daunting and fleeting task, yet there is a key connected to our freedom and when put this key in the lock it unlocks all other chains with it. This is giving our attention, our adoration, and our love to Jesus, the Son of God and Creator of all things. When we not only worship Jesus as our spiritual savior, but uplift his life as the way to be human (the way God meant for humankind to bear his image), and receive the Holy Spirit of revelation and power, our issues of identity and worship become clear. The New Testament claims that Jesus is not only a teacher and prophet, but he is God, and through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, God's Kingdom has come and welcomes us to submit our broken lives to the victorious and healing rule of God.

Why does all this matter?

All these refractions of false kingdoms that our eyes are drawn to separate us from love. When we direct our attention and desire toward something that can't love us back we we forget we are the beloved. When we are no longer surrounded by ultimate love who attributes value to Created people and living things, we begin to objectify and instrumentalize them, instead of sacrificing ourselves to protect their worth. Every human longs to be loved, and it starts with those that worship the Creator who sacrificed himself because of his love for creation. We must learn to love again, which happens at a heart and desire level by the Holy Spirit who reveals the greatness of Jesus’ love for us. This takes remembering what God has done for us and the value he declares over us, telling the story to each other that affirms this value, and opening up our own hearts to let our Creator whisper to us his gentle and healing words of identity and belonging into our ears.

Acknowledgments: Our Name is Icon is heavily influenced by the writing of James K.A. Smith, Jacques Ellul, Paul Ricour, Ian McGilchrist, Wendell Barry, Rene Girard, Eugene Peterson, Lesslie Newbegin, and Chris C.E. Green, and in response, looks to connect narrative, liturgy, and anthropology, with a proper creational theology through the use of art as an aesthetic and affective catechesis for our imaginations. – Tyler Hanson