Steve Jobs--Christ's Counterfeit

It is not my intent in this opinion piece to say anything derogatory or cast any aspersions upon Steve Jobs’ person. I know very little about the man’s personal life and make no judgment about him for good or for ill. But I do take issue with what he stands for as the media has edified him and where his products, and others like them, have taken so many unaware. Steve Jobs is, unarguably, the now-deceased human symbol of the changing of a millennium that we did not acknowledge on 01 January 2001—though the prime candidate, he had not yet been ordained the prophet of technology. Now he has been edified by the media.

In the decade following the turning of the millennial calendar, with its disappointments and disasters, the one bright point of hope for the secular world, seemingly, was a looking forward to each new miracle that Apple, under Steve Jobs’ innovation and leadership, could produce. The iPod and iPhone and iPad with their several updates and the competition’s hurried imitations became almost sacramental tokens of the gospel of secularism and the ‘me’ generation.

It is not, of course, the electronic instrument, itself, that is anathema, but where it has led so many.

In Andy Crouch’s piece on Steve Jobs (‘The Secular Prophet,’ Wall Street Journal, October 8-9, 2011), Crouch says, “[Jobs’] most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope.” He was the spokesman, by design or default, of that hope. That hope was that the promise of technology as the deliverer, or opiate, from the angst of a new generation’s existentialism now that they had put Christ as Deliverer, Redeemer, and Savior, and the hope of a better life beyond the troubles of this one, on the shelf of history. The ‘virtual’ or digital life that the possessor could live was now, as the ad-men would have you believe, as ‘good as it gets.’ (Until the next version comes out.)

The Holy Scriptures use the term ‘antichrist’: (e.g., “Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists…. Many false prophets are gone out into the world…and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of antichrist…they are of the world…and the world [alas] heareth them.” (1 John 2:18; 4:1,3,5) The term ‘antichrist’ means ‘instead of, or in place of Christ’ and His function. The antichrist is a person or a concept or a philosophy that mirrors closely the Gospel of faith, hope, and charity and redemption but provides a distorted mirror with ‘self’ as one’s own savior and consequently operates in opposition to Christ.

I do not view Steve Jobs as a devil, but do propose that by this definition became an antichrist.

The W.S.J.’s reviewer Andy Crouch says, “Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress…. He believed so sincerely in the ‘magical, revolutionary’ promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power.” Jobs said this in a Stanford University commencement address: “Someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

If you are over 50 don’t you hear this as an echo of the mantra: ‘Do your own thing’ that you heard in the 1960’s and ‘70’s? My counterpoint to that is that most peoples’ ‘inner voice,’ if primarily trained by the video games and movies/television and virtual (i.e., counterfeit) reality that makes up so much of electronic fare, unless it is an educated conscience, leads them down the path of least resistance to a truly hopeless and virtually meaningless life that has little room in it for serving anybody but themselves.

“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh [or selleth, if I don’t buy his product] a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian [I would hope] unto me.” (1 Corinthians 14:10-11)

But the voice of the True Shepherd still beckons. Steve Jobs’ last words were, according to his sister, “Oh wow, Oh wow, Oh wow!” as the light burst upon him and he slipped out of this life into the next.

Now that’s something to think about.