Notes on *Ploductivity*

Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth, Douglas Wilson (Canon Press, 2020)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Technology in all its forms is a type of wealth, and we are called to steward it well- which means productivity.

• "Technology is a form of wealth; progress is a form of wealth."(57)

• "And so here is my central thesis, stated yet again: technology in all its form is a type of wealth." (99)

Table of Contents

Part I: A Theology of Productivity

An Introduction to Technofullness

I. A Theology of Work

II. A Theology of Wealth

III. A Theology Tools

IV. A Theology of Media

V. A Theology of Missions and Media

VI. A Theology of Markets

VII. A Theology of Progress

VIII. A Theology of Glad Suspicion

Part II: Learning Ploductivity

IX.The Finitude of Work

X. Ambition is a Good Thing

XI. The Master Key

XII. The Power of Plodding

XIII. Work at a Pace You Can Maintain

XIV. Progress and Depravity

XV. Eschatology

XVI. New Media

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

An Introduction to Technofullness

• "As Peter Drucker said, "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."(7)

• "But I sincerely hope, at least for a number of you readers, this will be the last productivity book you read. Not because I have discovered the Lost Technique that once made Atlantis great and which I am about to share with you all for a modest fee, but rather because I hope this book will help you deal with the issues surrounding productivity in such a way as to help you mortify that most peculiar lust." (8)

• "If we get the theology of the thing right, then it should be something that our great-grandchildren can apply fruitfully fifty years from now when they are trying to incorporate who-knows-what into their daily lives. It probably won't be the iPhone 92." (10)

• "We have a perennial temptation to locate sin as resident in the stuff. Some refuse to see sin in the stuff, and therefore conclude that there must not be any sin. These are the technophiles. Others see clearly that there is sin, and so they conclude that it must be in the stuff, though maybe it is not in the earlier stuff. These are the technophobes." (10)

• "Technology is therefore a form of wealth. The reason this is important is because the Bible says very little about technology as such, but it gives us a great deal of blunt and pointed teaching on the subject of wealth. If we learn how to deal with wealth scripturally, then we will have learned how to deal with technology." (11)

• "This is what I mean by ploductivity. This is deliberate faithfulness: working in the same direction over an extended period of time. Our electronic servants may be super fast, but we should be as deliberate as ever." (11)

I. A Theology of Work

• See Notable Content for "What does good work look like?"

• "We are saved by grace, but grace works."(19)

• "We are not saved by good works (Eph. 2:8-9), but we are saved to good works.(Eph. 2:10)" (20)

II. A Theology of Wealth

• "Wealth- monetary, technological, or otherwise- is simply and solely a good thing, a gift of God. The sin enters in when the means of self-sufficiency are placed in the hands of someone who has entirely the wrong attitude about autonomous self-sufficiency." (21)

• "The arrogant human heart is the source of the sin concerning wealth, and the arrogant human heart sins this way in the proximity of wealth. Wealth is not the locus of the sin, but the presence of the wealth is the locus of the temptation." (23)

• "The solution to self-sufficiency is not to banish the goods that we used to forget God, but rather to make a point of remembering God in and through the abundance He gave to us." (25)

• "We are not only tempted by wealth, we are tempted to blame wealth. It can be a sin to misunderstand the nature of sin. In other words, we are tempted to locate the sin in the stuff, and then we try to solve the problem (when and if we do try to solve it) by putting some kind of respectable distance between us and the stuff. If people sin with alcohol, tobacco and firearms, and they do, then we think we must regulate the substances (or the tools) themselves." (25)

• "If I were to make a decision to throw my old heart away, that decision would have to be made by my old heart. And if my old heart could do something as wonderful as throwing my old heart away, what is the need for a new heart?" (25)

III. A Theology Tools

• "In order to evaluate a tool, we have to account for the telos, the end, the purpose. Hammers are used to build both brothels and barns." (29)

• "When we sin with a material object, or in near proximity to a material object, the most obvious thing to occur to us is to blame that material object." (29)

• "Tools enable us to widen our reach. Tools make it possible for our radius of fruitfulness (now there is a phrase for the ages_ to extend much farther than it otherwise would. So when Adam found the beehive-knocking-down stick, he was wealthier than he was before. When a man purchases an app for 99 cents, he is wealthier than he was before. Tools are technology, and technology is a form of wealth." (32)

• "We should regard tools the same way we regard our money- with grateful suspicion. Or perhaps, on alternating weeks, with suspicious gratitude." (32)

IV. A Theology of Media

• "I would define media in this way: working out from and including our bodies, media also include our clothes, other people, and tools, including especially tools for communication and infrastructure." (34)

• "God was the one who told us to multiply. And one of the things that necessarily grows and develops with that multiplication is the largely invisible world of media. When we notice it, which happens rarely, our reflex action is to worry about it- as though getting your news off a smartphone is somehow less "authentic" than getting it from newsprint, telegraphs, or smoke signals." (37)

• "But when we see that tools are a subset of media, and that media were obviously a gift from God, given to us through the mere fact of creation, we should become much more comfortable with the idea of tools as essential to our humanity." (37)

V. A Theology of Missions and Media

• "When Jesus spoke these words, going into the world meant what we would call travel (going from one place to another yourself), and it meant communication across distance (going from one place to another by means of media). Communication media at the same time largely meant letters, or epistles. We still have the same basic options- travel and communications media." (40)

• "So what should we bring with us when we travel? What should we send with our messages when we write? The answer is Jesus, but this must be understood rightly." (40)

• "The fact that we have greatly accelerated the pace of these two functions (travel over distance and communication across distance) is nothing new in principle." (41)

• "Your country can only export whatever it is your farmers are growing. When you go somewhere, or when you send a message somewhere, you are simply projecting what you already are." (42)

• "If you are alive, vibrant, and forgiven, you now live in a world where you can project that in amazing ways." (42)

VI. A Theology of Markets

• "Control of the future is actually a (vain) attempt to control people, with the future as our instrument." (47)

• "Two words that do not go together are control and future. The future, like salvation, is the gift of God, and it must be apprehended by faith alone." (48)

• "The two issues mentioned earlier that underlie economics are first, the need for us to respect the free choices of others, and second, to use our own power of free choice to investigate the fruitful world God gave to us." (48)

• "The free market does not decide the price of the new zippers. That decision is made by the Lord Jesus. A statement like that hits us sideways because we are accustomed to think about the world in a quasi-Diestic terms. Sure, God made everything some time long ago, but things happen now because of impersonal natural laws, right? Gravity pulls things to the floor, centrifugal force pulls them out to the edges, and the law of supply and demand determines the cost of zippers. But the biblical doctrine is actually one of creating and ongoing providence. All of it is personal." (49)

• "We are to put our hand to the work, doing the best we can with it, and we are to keep our hands off the future." (50)

• "My responsibility is, so to speak, whatever is in front of me, there on my workbench or desk or counter. I should do a first-rate job with that, and other things will fall into place. And as they fall into place, it will not be the impersonal doing of Adam Smith's invisible hand. Every blessing a Christian ever receives is from a pierced hand." (50)

VII. A Theology of Progress

• "Wealth is the technical ability to summon the labor of others, either in person or through the application of tools, but the person in possession of that wealth has to have the ability to know how to do it." (53)

• "If you are anything like me, you need to learn how to manage this embarrassment of wealth. In short, you need to learn how to become more productive." (55)

VIII. A Theology of Glad Suspicion

• "The Bible does teach us what our orientation toward health should be- that of glad suspicion, or maybe, on our gloomy days, suspicious gladness." (57)

• "The technophile just assumes that man is the measure of all things, and he plumps his resume in order to get a job with Google, so that he too may become one of the lords of the earth. The technophobe just memorizes the poetry of Wendell Berry, and yearns for the days of yesterday when all our food was eked out under a hot sun by a slow mule and a picturesque peasant staggering behind it. Both are forms of ingratitude; both are grotesque. The only obedient response is to accept that wealth as the gift of God that it is, and to keep it in its proper creaturely place." (59)

• "Although there is a bias toward sin in the possession of such blessings, it is important to emphasize by means of reiteration that sin is not resident within the things themselves. In this respect, it is like the old covenant- God finds fault with the people (Heb. 8:7-8). There is no sin in immunizations, in iPhones, in Google searches, in air travel, or in Lasik eye surgery. To the extent it is progress, it is the result of God's kindness as mediated through our culture as fruit of the gospel." (59)

• "To whatever extent it is not a blessing, it is not progress. If it is progress, then we must thank God for it- He is the one who gives us the power to get wealth, and there is no appropriate or safe response to that wealth other than complete and simple gratitude." (61)

• "It does not profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, and there is an additional sting when he then loses the world too. Whatever to worship in place of God is another thing you lose. Whatever you surrender gladly to Him is returned to you, pressed down, shaken, and running over." (62)

• "There is not one blessing we enjoy that was not given to us by the hand of Jesus Christ. If we insist on ignoring His lordship, his blood, His authority, and His kindness, then the time is coming, and now is, when He will chastise us by taking it all away. If we seek the Kingdom, then other things will be added. If we don't acknowledge Him, worship Him, or bow down before Him, He takes away that which was blocking the view, which in our case is all our stuff." (62)

An Introduction to Ploductivity

• "Living and working in the presence of God is essential because what constitutes a truly productive person is the fact that they are laboring under the blessing of God." (68)

• "Living in the presence of God means that you are living in such a way as to invite or seek His favor. The Sabbath and the tithe illustrate well the trust we are to display in this. Would you rather work hard for seven unblessed days or work hard for six blessed days? Would you rather try to live on 100% of an unblessed income or on 90% of a blessed income?"(69)

• "Pray that God establish the work of your hands, and not just the work of your heart. This is not a facile "health and wealth" approach because God is not to be treated as some kind of a vending machine. God's blessing includes both temporal victories and temporal defeats, and evangelical faith knows how to handle all of it." (69)

IX. The Finitude of Work

• "Too many people confound our finitude with our sinfulness, but the breach between us and God is one that was caused by our unholiness, not by our size. Before Adam sinned he was just as small as the day after he sinned, but he was still able to walk with God in the garden in the cool of the day. Our size is a feature, not a bug." (72)

• "We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared beforehand for us to do, God is up to something big- He has a cosmic project in view- and not one of us knows the fullness of what that is." (72)

• "When God created ex nihilo, He was doing all the work. When we work as sub-creators, to use Tolkein's word for it, we are dealing with pre-existent materials and processes. This is because God is using the miniscule works that we are performing to teach us to trust Him, and to teach us the meaning of work." (74)

• "Remembering the finitude of your labors will keep you humble. Recognizing that your labors have a place in God's cosmic intentions for the universe will keep you from thinking that your tiny labors are stupid labors. They are nothing of the kind. Your labors in the Lord are not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58)." (74)

X. Ambition is a Good Thing

• "The true Christian is characterized, not by a lack of desire, but rather through a desire that is calibrated to its appropriate object, which is ultimately Christ." (76)

• "Many Christians think their problem lies in the verbs, when it actually lies in the direct objects and in the adverbs. They think they are to be faulted because they want , because they desire. But the actual problem is not that we desire, but that we desire the wrong things, or that we desire the right things wrongly." (77)

• "Setting ambitious goals is therefore a good thing, and determining whether or not we are desiring something sinful, or desiring it sinfully, is heart work. We do that heart work by praying to the Lord about it, by reading the Word faithfully, looking to be instructed, and by worshipping God together with Hid people, gathering regularly to be edified by Word and sacrament." (78)

XI. The Master Key

• "It is impossible to read through the Scriptures and come to the conclusion that the Lord thinks slipshod work is good enough." (80)

• "Learn what good work is, imitate it studiously, and do that over time." (82)

XIII. Work at a Pace You Can Maintain

• "The thing to take away is that brief but daily routines are capable of accumulating a large amount of whatever the work product might be. A man could take out the trash every evening, and while out there quietly lay one brick, and after six months present his with with a brick wall along the alley- something she never even knew she wanted." (94)

XIV. Progress and Depravity

• "The birth of the modern age, measured in terms of conveniences, technology, wealth, medical advances, and so on was largely a legacy of the Reformation. But the Bible teaches that whenever a gift is given, there will immediately be a temptation arising in our hearts to steal the glory and gratitude that should go to God alone." (95)

• "A commons worry among modern sophisticates is that technology really is making us stupid. It would be better to say that technology when ignored or mismanaged makes us stupid, but this has always been the case with every form of wealth." (97)

• "The world, this world, is presently going where Jesus is taking it. So we should be wise, and stop worrying." (99)

XV. Eschatology

• My optimism about tools and technology is, at bottom, an optimism that is grounded on the fact that at the darkest point in human history, God in the flesh was crucified by arrogant sinners, by all the important people. Three days after that, the Lord came back from the dead. That means that the world has been overthrown. How could that world not be overthrown? That world is dead because its only power was death, and we serve a Lord who went into death's maw, and then came out again. That is the ultimate plot turn. That is the central fact of all human history." (103)

XVI. New Media

• "When the bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, his reply was "Because that's where the money is." Christians should go with our life-transforming message, and where should we go? Where the people are."(106)

• "We proclaim the lordship of Christ over everything, and we do so, not because we have invited Him into our hearts, but rather because He rose from the dead, ascended into the presence of the Ancient of Days, and was given a universal and cosmic authority Dan. 7:13-14)." (107)

• "Jesus is already Lord of those who recognize it, and He is already Lord of those who refuse to recognize it. This means that the authority of Jesus Christ, right now and not later, currently extends over Facebook, Google, and Twitter." (107)

• "So wherever people are, Christians should be right there, with all our work, talking about the Lord. You know, theLord. The Lord over all of this." (108)

Notable Content

• "I am seeking to stake out an entirely different third position, over against the twin errors of technophobia and technophilia." (9)

• What does good work look like? (17-18)

  1. "First, work is a good thing, and the hard way is actually the easy way."

  2. "Second, the right kind of work- when a particular result is desired- quenches the wrong kind of desire."

  3. "Third, the Bible teaches that diligence and laziness are visible."

  4. "Fourth, the diligent like to have their work speak for them, and unproductive men like to substitute talk for action. Lazy men are good talkers."

• A description of the man hours required in just the manufacturing of a No. 2 pencil. (52)

• "A good example of an erudite worrier would be Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. But for every book like that, given the propensity of Calvinists to worry excessively about the heart of man, I would recommend that you read three like Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies, and Herman's The Idea of Decline in Western History." (102)