Vocational Attunement in Our Distracted Digital Age

[1] In our digital age, distractions are an inescapable part of daily life. From the moment we wake up to the instant we fall asleep, our attention is constantly being pulled in multiple directions. The ubiquity of smartphones, the enchantment of social media, the prevalence of multitasking, and the endless stream of digital content have created a landscape where sustained attention is a rare posture. This perpetual state of distraction not only impacts our productivity but also diminishes our ability to engage deeply with others in particular places at particular times. The digital age, with its promises of connectivity and social networking, has paradoxically fragmented our attention and disconnected us from our creaturely connection with fellow human creatures.

[2] Amidst these challenges, Martin Luther’s understanding of vocation offers a theological vision that drives God’s people into those creaturely relationships with those particular persons that God has placed into our lives to care for and serve. As God’s people seek to live well in our distracted digital age, the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer provides three practices of creaturely attunement to foster and embody: attentive listening, intercessory prayer, and cruciform forbearance.

The Digital Revolution

[3] One way to understand how we have arrived at our distracted digital age is to examine the transitions and changes in communication mediums and the corresponding technological developments accompanying them. Marshall McLuhan has famously described the impact of these transitions. McLuhan argues that various technologies and communication mediums are not merely tools to deliver information but are agents of social, cultural, and psychological change. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he argues that the technology of the printing press and the transition from the oral communication medium to a print communication medium resulted in the development of new mindsets, values, practices, and ways of seeing the world.[1]

[4] This position is encapsulated in McLuhan’s famous axiom, “The medium is the message.”[2] McLuhan’s point is that in terms of transformative capacity, the content of a printed book and, later, our TV shows, web pages, and social media posts are far less influential than the form through which that content is delivered. Said another way, when we think about the impact of the internet, social media, or digital technology, we are often concerned about the images, conversations, and videos found on them or the time spent on them. These are essential concerns, yet focusing only on content ignores the more fundamental question of how the form of the communication medium shapes and molds us into particular ways of thinking, feeling, interacting, acting, and believing.

[5] The digital revolution has only confirmed and reinforced McLuhan’s claims.[3] There have been countless revolutions throughout history. In the West, the French and American Revolutions often come first to mind. However, James Emory White contends that neither the French nor the American Revolution matches the sweeping changes brought about by the digital revolution.[4]

[6] The digital revolution cannot be fully understood apart from the development of digital devices, especially the iPhone.[5] Consequently, Thomas Friedman points to 2007 CE as one of the most transitionary years in human history. As he puts it, “What the H*** Happened in 2007?”[6] In 2007, the iPhone was released; Facebook (now Meta) left college campuses and entered the wider world; Twitter (now X) was spun off; Google bought YouTube and launched Android; Netflix began streaming videos; Amazon released the Kindle; and Internet users surpassed one billion worldwide.[7] 2007 was revolutionary not just because the iPhone was released but because of all its release set in motion and all that came after.

[7] The wide-scale creation and integration of digital technologies and devices into every aspect of our lives has had tremendous neurological, social, cultural, and psychological ramifications. A growing field of scholars has shown how digital devices and technologies are changing our brains and, as a result, our behavior.[8] Consequently, it is not merely the external world that is being transformed but our very selves, especially our ability to stay focused, process information, form habits, and interact with others.[9]

[8] The digital revolution has also led to a sense of “hyperconnection.”[10] Digital technologies provide incredible opportunities to move projects along for work at any time and immense opportunities to connect with loved ones across great distances. Yet it has also led to the experience that everywhere we go, we are “on” and “plugged in.”[11] News stories, reels, videos, hyperlinks, texts, phone calls, and emails are constant, and they unrelentingly invade every aspect of our lives. Our smartphones and digital devices have become part of us. We feel anxious and insecure when we cannot find them, and daily, our reliance upon them and our connection to them grows.[12] The integration of these devices into our lives and their kinesthetic, habit-forming capacities can fragment our attention and distract us from the people and places God has placed into our lives to nurture and cultivate.[13]

[9] Digital devices also primarily shape how we interact and connect with others, as these devices often mediate our connections and conversations. In this new technological context, Mary Aiken voices the fear many have about the long-term implications of this phenomenon, “Teens still obsess about appearance. Children are still playing together. But they are all alone – looking at their devices rather than one another. How will this shape the people they will become? And how, in turn, will they come to shape society?”[14]

[10] The digital revolution has provided incredible opportunities to work efficiently and connect over the miles. Yet, it has also changed and shaped us in fundamental ways, and it promises to do so even more in the future with the rise of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and technosocial visions like transhumanism (Humanity+), posthumanism, and the Metaverse.[15] Most concerningly, the digital revolution has led to an environment where it is far easier to forgo our face-to-face relationships with one another and become detached from the voices and cries of our fellow creatures in God’s creation. In this context, Martin Luther’s understanding of vocation provides a framework that attunes us to our creaturely connection with those persons we live with-and-within in our distracted digital age.

Luther on Creatureliness and Vocation(s)

[11] For Luther, the Triune God is a speaking God (deus dicens) who creates and re-creates through the Word.[16] God’s performative Word calls creation and all creatures into existence ex nihilo (Rom 4:17).[17] To say that God created everything “out of nothing,” “out of fatherly divine goodness and mercy,” means that there is a fundamental distinction between God the Creator and all other creatures.[18] In the Large Catechism, Luther asks what it means when we say that God is the “creator of heaven and earth.” Luther answers that it means we are God’s creatures who live under God’s care and protection.[19]

[12] Fundamental to Luther’s thought is that justification by faith does not remove the human creature from the creation but restores her to true human creatureliness.[20] Unlike some Christian traditions and other world religions, Luther emphasized that to be justified by faith, to be freed from the power of sin, death, and hell on account of Christ’s work and merit through the declaration of absolution, does not remove the restored human creature from the creation and life with other creatures; instead, justified by faith, the restored creature enters into a new worldliness and receives creation and fellow creatures, especially fellow human creatures, back as divine gifts.[21] Consequently, the creation becomes the arena of ethical action where the Christian serves God by serving her neighbors, her fellow creatures, in her vocations.[22]

[13] In Luther’s understanding of vocation, God works through ordinary human creatures for the penultimate well-being and flourishing of the creation and creaturely life.[23] Vocations consist not only of ecclesial callings like a pastor or missionary but encompass various callings of responsibility and service, such as a spouse, parent, economist, teacher, chef, and many more. Luther argued that human creatures are to serve in their vocations in concrete places of creaturely responsibility, the three estates: ecclesia (the church), oeconomia (the household), and politia (the state/civil society), and above all three, the common order of Christian love.[24] Within these estates, God hides behind human creatures and works through them in their vocations as “masks of God” (larvae dei) to deliver all good things.[25] As Luther puts it, “Creatures are only the hands, channels, and means through which God bestows all blessings.”[26]

[14] Even as God continues to preserve the whole creation and all creatures as the Creator until Christ’s return, the doctrine of vocation directs God’s people to the fellow creatures in their square mile. Given our various creaturely limitations, Christians cannot serve every neighbor at all times. Moreover, as Leopoldo Sanchez warns, “If everyone is my neighbor in general, then no one is my neighbor in particular!”[27] However, “vocation gives us a focus that allows us to give specific neighbors the attention, assistance, companionship, or partnership they need.”[28] Thus, Luther’s theology of vocation drives God’s people into those particular creaturely relationships that God has placed into our lives where we practice attunement.

Bonhoeffer and Practices of Attunement

[15] “Attunement,” Anna Abram writes, “has something to do with the way we react and relate to another person.”[29] Attunement is a posture of relationality where closeness, attentiveness, and connection are cultivated and nurtured. In our distracted digital age, where relationships with fellow creatures are often fragmented and mediated by digital technologies and devices, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s work provides three practices of creaturely attunement that God’s people would do well to foster and embody: attentive listening, intercessory prayer, and cruciform forbearance.

[16] In his influential work Life Together, Bonhoeffer describes how these practices were central in the seminary community at Finkenwalde, rooted in Jesus Christ and the “biblical and reformation message of the justification of human beings through grace alone.”[30] They are also practices that God’s people today can apply and embody inside and outside the Christian community to be better attuned to the particular human creatures God places into our lives to care for and serve in our vocations in our distracted digital age.

[17] “The first service one owes to others in the community involves listening to them,” Bonhoeffer writes.[31] Attentive listening helps counterbalance the constant noise, interruptions, and fragmented attention that characterize the digital age. In a context where digital devices and technologies often encourage surface-level exchanges, reinforce algorithmically curated echo chambers, and enable us to transcend our creaturely relationships to inhabit a virtual world of our own designing and choosing, attentive listening attunes us to slow down, be present, and engage with one another in face-to-face relationships as we seek first to understand and then be understood amid disagreements and differences (James 1:19).[32] Rather than listening in a way that presumes we already know what the other has to say, Bonhoeffer calls us to listen to others with “God’s ear.”[33] As we learn to listen to our fellow human creatures with God’s ear, we enter a position to share God’s word with them (2 Cor 1:3-7) and bring them before God in intercessory prayer.[34]

[18] Intercessory prayer, Bonhoeffer writes, means “bringing one another into the presence of God, seeing each other under the cross of Jesus as poor human beings and sinners in need of grace.”[35] In our digital age, where character assassination and canceling are prevalent, intercessory prayer attunes God’s people to bear with others in a spirit of humility and grace. Rather than smearing someone over text or on social media, intercessory prayer commends that person to God in the hope of restoration and redemption.

[19] Not only is intercessory prayer a blessing for the person being commended to God, but as Bonhoeffer notes, it is also a “purifying bath” for the Christian offering the prayer.[36] Instead of contributing to the divisiveness and shaming prevalent in digital interactions, intercessory prayer attunes our hearts toward mercy. It conforms Christians by the Holy Spirit’s power to see others with the mind of Christ and to take all of our thoughts, even our anger and frustration, captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:5).[37] Yet prayer must not lead to idle speculation but cruciform forbearance with fellow human creatures.

[20] Baptized into Jesus Christ, Bonhoeffer writes, “[t]he believer is placed under the cross of Christ.”[38] Social media creates a digital environment where we can easily detach ourselves from those who frustrate us by unfollowing or unfriending them, consequently removing them from our purview and care. This phenomenon spills over into our concrete interactions and everyday existence with one another, making it far easier to ignore and disconnect from those God has placed into our lives to suffer, endure, and support.

[21] The life of discipleship, however, is always cruciform, as God’s people bear the burden of others in their vocations in conformity to the crucified Christ, who became a curse for us and bore the burden of sin, death, and hell for us in his body on the cross (Gal 3:13).[39] To be justified by faith and freed from the burden of self-justification is to be freed for a life of focused attention and service to one another.[40] As Bonhoeffer puts it, Christian freedom does not consist in being freed from the other; instead, “Being free means ‘being free-for-the-other,’ because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”[41] In our distracted digital age that fosters detachment and disengagement from one another, God’s people must remain attuned to those particular human creatures we encounter in our vocations, bearing with one another in Christ-like forbearance and service (Gal 6:2, 10).

Conclusion

[22] The digital age has brought many incredible blessings and opportunities to our lives. Yet it also poses significant challenges to our ability to engage deeply with others in particular places at particular times. The constant presence and use of digital devices and technologies paradoxically leave us fragmented and disconnected from our creaturely connection with fellow human creatures.

[23] In this context, Martin Luther’s understanding of vocation and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s practices of creaturely attunement offer an alternative vision for living well in our digital age. Luther’s understanding of vocation drives God’s people into those particular creaturely relationships that have been placed into our lives to nurture and cultivate, and Bonhoeffer’s practices of attentive listening, intercessory prayer, and cruciform forbearance attune God’s people to live well with others amid the various temptations that accompany life in our distracted digital age. As God’s people strive to embody these practices with our fellow human creatures in our rapidly evolving technological landscape, we cultivate a posture of focused attention and care that better reflects the love and attentiveness with which the Triune God preserves and sustains the creation and all creatures.

[1] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962; Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2011).

[2] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 7-21.

[3] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992), 18, argues that technological change is “ecological” in that new technology/technologies do not add or subtract something in a given culture but transform and reconstitute it.

[4] James Emory White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2023), 38.

[5] Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021).

[6] Thomas Friedman, Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in an Age of Accelerations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 19.

[7] White, Hybrid Church, 39.

[8] See, for instance, Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010); Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Marks on Our Brains (New York: Random House, 2015); Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us (New York: Atria Books, 2017); Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Press, 2024).

[9] It is often believed that technology will evolve, but human persons will stay the same. Michael Bess, Make Way for the Superhumans: How the Science of Bio-enhancement Is Transforming Our World, and How We Need to Deal with It (London: Icon, 2016), 7, calls this “the Jetsons fallacy” and argues that it is fundamentally mistaken.

[10] Jesse Rice, The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009).

[11] Sherry Turkle, “Always-on/Always-on-You: The Tethered Self,” in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, ed. James E. Katz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008): 121-137.

[12] Nicholas Carr, “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-smartphones-hijack-our-minds-1507307811

[13] James K.A. Smith, Imagining The Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 142.

[14] Mary Aiken, The Cyber Effect: One of the World’s Experts in Cyberpsychology Explains How Technology is Shaping the Development of Our Children, Our Behavior, Our Values, and Our Perception of the World – and What We Can Do About It (New York: Random House, 2017), 303.

[15] Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 34-60

[16] Robert Kolb and Charles P. Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking For The Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 129-220; Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, ed. and trans. Jeffrey G. Silcock and Mark C. Mattes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 16-21.

[17] Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 1-5 (1535), vol. 1, 47-49, in Luther’s Works, American Edition, vols. 1–30, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955– 1976); vols. 31–55, ed. Helmut Lehmann (Philadelphia/Minneapolis: Muhlenberg/Fortress, 1957– 1986); vols. 56–82, ed. Christopher Boyd Brown and Benjamin T. G. Mayes (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2009–), hereafter LW. Cf. LW 22:5-28.

[18] Charles P. Arand, “The Unbounded Creator and the Bounded Creatures,” Lutheran Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 267-287.

[19] LC, 1^st Article, 9-24. Cited in Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of The Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 432-433, hereafter Kolb-Wengert.

[20] LW 34:138-139; 151-157. See Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 154-176; John W. Hoyum, “Exchange, Atonement, and Recovered Humanity: Martin Luther on the Passive Obedience of Christ,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 23, no. 3 (July 2021): 333-351; Kolb and Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology, 21-128.

[21] Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 27-28; Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 106-115; Oswald Bayer, Freedom in Response: Lutheran Ethics: Sources and Controversies, trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14.

[22] Gerhard O. Forde, “Luther’s ‘Ethics,’” in The Essential Forde: Distinguishing Law and Gospel, eds. Nicholas Hopman, Mark C. Mattes, and Steven D. Paulson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019): 139-145,139-140

[23] Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (1957; Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004). For a more recent engagement with Luther’s doctrine of vocation, see Mark D. Tranvik, Martin Luther and the Called Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016). For a distillation of significant themes in the recent literature on vocation, see Christopher Richmann, “What Are They Saying (and Not Saying) about Vocation?” Word & World 43, no. 3 (Summer 2023): 199-207.

[24] LW 37:364-365. For a thorough discussion of Luther’s understanding of the three estates, see Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 120-153. Michael R. Laffin, The Promise of Martin Luther’s Political Theology: Freeing Luther From the Modern Political Narrative (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 25, notes that “the estates are the places for Luther where humans can expect to encounter the promised presence of God and receive and hand on God’s goodness from and to one’s neighbors.”

[25] Mark C. Mattes, Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 13, nicely captures Luther’s understanding of larvae dei: “For Luther, there is no God to be had apart from some ‘covering’ or ‘wrapper’ whether that wrapper is God masking himself in created, material realities or giving himself sacramentally to the church.” Cf. LW 1:11-15; LW 2:46-49; LW 3:107-109, 166; LW 4:178-179; LW 5:244, 249; LW 6:172-173; LW 14:114-115; LW 24:67; LW 26:95; LW 37:68-69; LW 45:96-100.

[26] LC, 1^st Commandment, 26-27. Cited in Kolb-Wengert, The Book of Concord, 389.

[27] Leopoldo A. Sanchez, “Immigration and the Theology of Vocation,” Dialog 60, no. 3 (2021): 314-321, 317.

[28] Leopoldo A. Sanchez, “The Human Face of Justice: Reclaiming the Neighbor in Law, Vocation, and Justice Talk,” Concordia Journal 39, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 117-132, 126

[29] Anna Abram, “Relationality and Attunement in Teaching Christian Ethics,” Studies in Christian Ethics 33, no. 1 (2020): 55-60, 56.

[30] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works – Reader’s Edition, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 6.

[31] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 75-76.

[32] See Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 3.

[33] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 75.

[34] For a thoughtful and well-crafted theology of prayer, see John W. Kleinig, Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2008), 151-217.

[35] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 64. God’s people can intercede for others because we have been justified by faith, united to Christ, and have access to God’s grace for Christ’s sake (Heb 4:16). See Kleinig, Grace Upon Grace, 203-204; 217.

[36] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 64.

[37] For a relevant discussion on anger and the Christian life, see Jeffrey A. Gibbs, “Ok, So It’s Not Righteous… But What Do I Do with My Anger? Reflections on Anger in the Christian Life,” Concordia Journal 44, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 51-56.

[38] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Works – Reader’s Edition, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 186.

[39] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 77-79. Cf. LW 26:276-284; LW 31:298-303; LW 35:118-120.

[40] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 72.

[41] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 3, eds. Martin Rüter and Ilse Tödt, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 63. For Bonhoeffer, freedom and responsibility belong together; see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works – Readers Edition, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Charles C. West (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 200-205. Cf. LW 31:364-371.