Steve Jobs died, at fifty six years of age, during the first week of October, 2011. The event was marked across the world, and the memorial words were effusive in the honor of his achievements related to near unbelievable inventions in computers, television, telephones (wireless), electronics, all enhanced by his rapid innovations that captured the imaginations of virtually every population of nations. The Wall Street Journal in its weekend edition (10/8-9/2011) offered a near full page photograph of Jobs, and entitled the article following, The Secular Prophet. The introductory paragraph included the following statement: Steve Jobs turned Eve’s apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded? At the threshold of death Jobs was spiritually concerned.
Andy Crouch, Executive Editor of Christianity Today, presented Jobs as many others presented him in the various media I reviewed. Observations were not contradictory. (They often are.) There was clearly a sense of awe in the writers, expanding into the privacy of the man, almost completely separating his personal life from the professional creative genius that he was. The Crouch article introduced him in summary: Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways – as a designer, an innovator, a demanding and occasionally ruthless leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope . . . . The piece continues using the biblical/literary formations related to Judeo/Christian Scripture. (The apple was posited by John Milton in his writings, as the object of violation. No one knows the identity of the fruit. My guess is that the fruit no longer exists, or is a part of a context, not wholly natural, that does not survive in our era. Parable has been downgraded in modern times. We stumble along with figurative language. One needs to note the baggage that is thrown on to the Judeo/Christian train of faith in so many instances, including this one.)
Because many students of the Steve Jobs mystique have ventured to expand on their interpretation of him and his work in the light of spiritual principle, what hope is, we also venture. I acknowledge that others may not use the word hope as we use it here, but my justification comes from the context in which his work and ideas were cast. Jobs surprised everyone when he approached the concept of death in a speech at Stanford University, a highly regarded community of scholars and students. (I respect Stanford, and did considerable research in the Hoover Library when students were sometimes trashing the campus in the 1960s.) The accents of his speech summarized the point of a secular prophet. There was the idea and reality of death, and its unwelcome certainty, but nothing of God, or what is known, in Christian theology, as the blessed hope. It is a blessed hope in that immortality is its fruit, engaged by faith. We gain partial understanding by differentiating hope from whatever definition the speaker chooses, from the blessed hope as it was carried forward by Jesus and the Apostles. Had Steve Jobs believed in that blessed hope, he could not have addressed the Stanford audience without alluding to it in some way, as a gift of faith in God. Holding humanism at a high level, he possessed no objective hope. Jobs’ hope becomes an individual matter to be found some way as an ephemeral concept. Any suggestion may be brave, presumed fitting to natural evidence, but it is not hope in that after-death context as the Scripture has it. Aspirations do arise, carried over to future generations, personal and presumed encompassing. Hope as God would have it does not relate to wishing, intelligence, creativity, wealth, or any other thing than faith in the redemptive plan of God. To use the apple – as Jobs did – as a symbol becomes, to the true believer, a peculiar choice. Biblically it became in its taking a sign of rebellion, a violation, an act of pride, of orienting to something that condemns the race. Redemptive faith clarifies the meaning of hope. Hope transitions to immortality. It needs also to be said here that it requires a human faith to believe there is something to follow death. Whatever is believed to be either continuance or eradication requires faith for believing life or believing nothing. I do not know the future in human evidence, that is ignorance, but knowing by faith is a different way of managing unknown mystery. It is an interpretation beyond nature with a logical system of its own. It has wisdom in it that covers the need of vision for life to a longer future. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020