I mean, you really can’t. I’m thoroughly persuaded there is no way.
Which is kinda why even though I am appreciating all this dialogue, it isn’t really moving the needle for me as I think through the Amish and pinpoint the exact points of how I would critique them. I don’t know how we guard ourselves from certain threats without rejecting certain technology.
Bear with me. I am more or less just trying on the devil’s advocate hat to try to wrap my head around the Amish rationale.
We talk about purity at the individual level quite often in the church. We exhort men, personally, to make no provision for their flesh, with an expectation that such efforts manifest differently for different men, given their individual struggles. But at some point does a church, as one man, just say, enough is enough? If we are constantly exhorting our men to put down their smart phones, does there come a point where we just say to hell with the smart phone altogether? Does a church ever covenant together, as one man, to put away some specific thing – even though the thing itself be arbitrary in the overall scheme of things, and not an explicit command of Scripture? In other words, could the elders impose a ban on the use of smart phones in the congregation – as Chrysostom banned the attendance of the theatre? Or does such a prohibition constitute an unlawful binding of the conscience that oversteps the authority of the church over the individual?
I mean, come on. Based on the last several months of posting, it seems like @jtbayly is ready to be done with film/entertainment and @ldweeks is only a stone’s throw away from rejecting the internet. We’re not far from jettisoning certain technology. You’re on the doorstep of some sort of new Amish paradigm, guys. Just pull the trigger. 