Determining Values: Certificate Authority

Before continuing on to other topics, I want to discuss the concept of a certificate authority.  Due to laziness, I'm going to steal some paragraphs from good old Wikipedia to introduce today's topic.

"A CA issues digital certificates that contain a public key and the identity of the owner. The matching private key is not made available publicly, but kept secret by the end user who generated the key pair. The certificate is also a confirmation or validation by the CA that the public key contained in the certificate belongs to the person, organization, server or other entity noted in the certificate. A CA's obligation in such schemes is to verify an applicant's credentials, so that users and relying parties can trust the information in the CA's certificates. CAs use a variety of standards and tests to do so. In essence, the certificate authority is responsible for saying 'Yes, this person is who they say they are, and we, the CA, certify that.'

If the user trusts the CA and can verify the CA's signature, then s/he can also assume that a certain public key does indeed belong to whoever is identified in the certificate.

Public-key cryptography can be used to encrypt data communicated between two parties. This can typically happen when a user logs on to any site that implements the HTTP Secure protocol. In this example let us suppose that the user logs on to his bank's homepage www.bank.example to do online banking. When the user opens www.bank.example homepage, he receives a public key along with all the data that his web-browser displays. The public key could be used to encrypt data from the client to the server but the safe procedure is to use it in a protocol that determines a shared symmetric encryption key; messages in such protocol are ciphered with the public key and only the bank server has the private key to read them. The rest of the communication proceeds using the new (disposable) symmetric key, so when the user enters some information to the bank's page and submits the page (sends the information back to the bank) then the data the user has entered to the page will be encrypted by his web browser. Therefore, even if someone can access the (encrypted) data that was communicated from the user to www.bank.example, such eavesdropper cannot read or decipher it.

This mechanism is only safe if the user can be sure that it is the bank that he sees in his web browser. If the user types in www.bank.example, but his communication is hi-jacked and a fake web-site (that pretends to be the bank web-site) sends the page information back to the user's browser, the fake web-page can send a fake public key to the user (for which the fake site owns a matching private key). The user will fill the form with his personal data and will submit the page. The fake web-page will get access to the user's data.

Whew!  Well, if you're still with me, the point that I‘d like to make is that we all have certificate authorities in our life, and not just our digital life.  As mentioned in the previous post, we have all stared squarely in the face of the question, Quid est veritas? and arrived, if not at an answer, then at least at a liveable compromise.  This serves as the third party between us and whatever information or source that we encounter in the wilds of daily life.  It tells us if something is true or false, reliable or dangerous, and we choose to place our faith in it because, if we're honest, it's exhausting to vet all of the deluge of information that we are inundated with on a daily basis.  This is not Biblical.  What is Biblical is the idea that you are to "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."  In short, you are the guardian of your worldview, and you need to be aware of impostors, of will-intentioned but incorrect teachers, of fools, and of the malicious.  How many of us have been compromised on Facebook, Hotmail, or had our credit card hijacked?  The certificate authority failed to correctly discern the truth about our enemy's identity.  The only one who can guard your worldview from corruption, by choosing your authority wisely, is you.

I realise that this will come as a no-brainer to many of you.  I realise also that it is a bit of a repetition of last week's thoughts.  Jesus tells us the parable of the man who built his house on a sandy foundation and suffered ruin and the other man who built on stone and found security amidst the tempest.  It is my conviction that as we move forward in our study at the interface of technology, and above all social technologies, we are consistently, persistently, and constantly, faced with the Great Question of Pilate.  But we must realise the error of that question, for what he needed to ask, what we all need to ask, is qui est veritas, "Who is truth?"  It is for this reason that the church in bygone days made an anagram of Pilate's Great Question that answered the question itself by stating Est Vir qui adest, "It is the Man who is here."  

In the next two blogs, as we look at the two great doctrines that are summarised in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, we realise that the pursuit of truth is no longer the simple establishment of a worldview that will remain as a static filter, a moral sieve contracted out to a third party certificate authority, it is rather the connection to the entirety of the Network of the Universe, the God-Man Jesus, who is not merely a passive intermediary, but rather the active imputation of Truth onto the hearts of men.  To force the original analogy further, it is God Who invites us to remove any intermediary between He Who Is Truth and the "end users", not just because any other authority is unnecessary, but because it is a false authority, not to be trusted with the data of our eternality.

Determining values: Quid est veritas?

When Pontius Pilate was faced with the extremely unenviable task of deciding the fate of Jesus of Nazareth, he found himself poorly equipped for the task.  Here was a man with no criminal record, presented to him with a riot as his escort, charged according the laws of a religion that was as alien as it was unsettling to the Roman order of things.  His wife had dreams warning him to beware of dealing wrongly in this case, the Jewish leaders framed the necessity of condemning Jesus as a sign of faithfulness to the Roman emperor, and the one man who should be providing answers seemed to speak in enigmas.  It is therefore to his credit that he risked his life and career to proclaim Jesus innocent, even after Jesus admits to having a kingdom of some sort, a dangerous idea to be proclaiming given his context.  In the midst of his frustration, Pilate asks what I call The Great Question: “Quid est veritas?” or, “What is truth?”

In using technology, we will find that this question is everywhere.  What is truth?  Is it true that I should trust Google with my data?  Is it true that I should constantly update the world with the minutia of my life, thoughts, problems, victories, et cetera via Facebook?  Is it true that because the news says something happened, it happened?  Is it true that seeing is believing?  What.  Is.  Truth.

I feel sorry for Pilate.  He is often criticized, but I think that that is unfair.  Imagine yourself coming from his background, without the apparatus to understand the Jewish worldview, especially if all that you saw of it was trying to destroy your culture at every turn.  I think of Pilate more along the lines of how he is depicted in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.  Given all of this, the question that this Roman functionary poses can be taken as one of exasperation, of confusion, of honest query, or even as one of cynicism.

It is tragically ironic, then, that he uttered these words while staring into the face of the very One who, short hours before, had made the outrageous claim “Ego sum via et veritas et vita” that is, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  We as Christians believe that this claim was as true as it was seemingly outrageous.

Therefore, as we seek to build a framework with which to approach the question of how to interface faith and technology in a biblical way, we who value reason and holiness must agree that the answer to The Great Question is the person, works, teachings, and measure of Jesus of Nazareth.  Thankfully, He gave us ample examples of each of these, and even bothered to summarize them in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, which we will explore hereafter.

For this week, I invite you to reflect on Who Jesus is, on what He has taught us.  What does it mean that He is the Truth?  How can using Him as the measure of Truth impact how you view the news?  How you text?  How you blog?

Until next time, peace and purity to you all!

-H

Determining Values: Worldview Absolutes

It is logical to preface this series with some thoughts on worldview. For the record, a worldview is a framework by which we guide our ethics, our morality, and eventually, our actions. The question of what constitutes a biblical approach to technology requires a worldview that accepts a few basic postulations. These are as follows: 

That the Bible constitutes the foundation for this worldview and is therefore treated as inerrant and absolute in its message although at times subjective in its contextualization or application.

That the Bible is capable of teaching a worldview that adapts to technological advances. 

That a consistent approach to interpreting Scripture is necessary to arrive at correct interpretations of this worldview. 

I will be using the inductive Bible study method for segments where I reference Scripture. You can read about it here: http://www.intothyword.org/pages.asp?pageid=53489 

So here we are, talking worldview. How is this relevant going forward? Well, to begin with, we need to realize that in adopting a worldview we are accepting the idea of universal absolutes. If we dare to say, "Thing A is true" than we are also saying that "Thing B, which is opposite to Thing A, is NOT true." To say that "Things A and B, which affirm opposite statements of the truth, are BOTH true" is to speak the language of paradox and not of reason, or in other words, gibberish. Something cannot be completely true and completely false at the same time, and thus absolutes do exist. The trick, of course, is in finding them! 

The second realization that we need to have is that absolute truth must then be applied to individual situations, so we have to understand how take The Big Idea and see in what way our current problem/situation/emergency/question/et cetera fits into the Big Idea. For example, God told David to attack the Philistines, but that doesn't mean that that's what He wants you to do on your Jerusalem tour this next summer (if you can even find yourself some Philistines, in which case a book deal and a lot of money are probably in your future). However, the Bible teaches that demon worship (which was practiced by the Philistines) is condemned by God in a universal way. It is ALWAYs wrong, it is ALWAYS to be rejected and resisted. It will ALWAYS result in death of a spiritual and usually physical kind. 

The question that the Christian poses, then, is: "How do I know when to apply the Bible literally and when to abstract a biblical concept and then distill it into practical actions?" We'll talk about that question quite a bit in this series of posts, but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew right now...this is already getting long! To close today's post, I just want to clarify what I am NOT going to do in this series: 

I am not going to cover every possible scenario or question related to the intersection of technology and Christian theology. 

I am not going to produce a perfect work. I've never done anything perfectly in my life! 

I am not going to write a theological dissertation. I will try to be faithful, accurate, and concise in my use of Scripture; I will not try nor claim to be exhaustive. 

I will not make the mistake of assuming that I am an expert. I'm just thinking and praying things through and hope you enjoy doing so with me! 

So, there it is, our first foray into this question of what biblical theology can tell us about technology.  I'm excited and I hope you are, too!  Until next time, God's blessings on you and yours,

The Husband

Coming next week: Quid veritas est?

Are you an Amorite?

Think about something that you truly depend on...your job, your marriage, your understanding of Scripture even.  And now imagine that God permits it to go bust (in the last case, I'm imagining a scenario where you were fundamentally misunderstanding Scripture somehow; think the Prosperity Gospel). What now? What would change in your relationship with God if your career, your family, your faith, or your dreams were completely changed? In retrospect, what mistakes would you see that you are making right now that are contributing to that self-destruction? Where have you misunderstood the purpose of your life? I think that we have a tendency to figure that if that moment hasn't come, it's because we're doing everything fundamentally correctly. But what if we're the Amorites and our judgment hasn't arrived yet because "our iniquity is not yet full"? God allows us to persist in error, and to ignore His promptings through Scripture, Spirit, nature, and community in the hopes that we will allow Him to reset our course. Our we persisting in destruction? Is your life about what it's supposed to be about?

Questioning and praying with you,
H