John Dyer's "People of the Screen"

John Dyer is VP for Enrollment and Educational Technology and Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He has been a technology creator for over 20 years, and his research focuses on the intersection of faith and technology, including Bible software, digital ecclesiology, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism.

Dyer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of People of the Screen is an analysis of the way Bible software developers think about what their larger goals are. “the common point made by all the Bible software teams was that all forms of Bible engagement have the potential to help people achieve a changed life, and that life change is more important than the form … evangelical ministries and Bible software developers are less concerned with conclusion, interpretation, or forms of engagement than with reiterating the end goal of spiritual transformation that happens through Bible engagement. In this sense, Bible engagement itself is not the end goal, but a means to the end of ‘life change.’” That ended a section focused on average church-going Bible readers, and half way through page 99 and new section begins, entitled “A Time Machine for Pastors” which explains how desktop Bible software is designed to bring a variety of historical research to pastors preparing sermons which presents a different financial model than phone-based reading apps.

Although I can’t say page 99 is the “single best page to introduce what the book is about” it seems like a fair representative of the kinds of things that are happening in the book and touches on many of the finer points without spelling them out directly. At a basic level, People of the Screen is about what happens when people shift from reading the Bible in print to reading it on screen. But it turns out this shift is not like the shift from scrolls to codices or from a hand-written codex to a printed book. In those cases, we left the previous technology behind, but today it appears that readers, both religious and not religious, use a combination of print and digital reading. People of the Screen is also about the unique role of evangelicals in developing Bible software and the characteristics of the evangelicalism as a whole that make it tend to resist some elements of culture change while embracing others, notable technology.

Page 99, then, does surface some of the complexities of the way evangelicals think about the Bible itself. They don’t believe that it’s just a book with information that one needs to learn (like a history or science book) and it’s not merely a set of rules one needs to follow (like a legal or ethic text). It is those things, but for evangelicals, the Bible is also a kind of conduit to connect with God, and when one connects with God, that should bring about a changed life, one that is more peaceful and has less conflict (or sin). Page 99 section talks about how evangelical Bible programmers attempt to develop apps that encourage people to read more, not merely for more information, but more life change.

At the same time, these apps aren’t free, so I’m glad that page 99 also introduces the realities of the business models of Bible apps. One of the key ideas of the book is that evangelicals approach technology with what I call “Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism” and this page has a little bit of all of those things.

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--Marshal Zeringue