To Gaze and to Behold
and dating apps
For just as those who look to the true godhead receive in themselves the unique features of the divine nature, so too, the one who devotes himself to the vanity of idols is transformed into that upon which he looks, becoming a stone instead of a human being.
Gregory of Nyssa
your young men shall see visions
Joel 2:28
Seeing Rightly
One common motif in the Bible is the idea of seeing rightly.1 For instance, the New Testament often uses the healing of physical blindness as a symbol for faith that gives us spiritual eyes to see.
He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
John 9:25
Nor is it merely symbolic that Paul is blinded by God on the road to Damascus and it requires the healing touch of a brother for the “scales to fall from his eyes”.
The healing of physical blindness is a pointer, a shadow of the spiritual sight that Christians gain through faith, for the right and appropriate perception of the world and people.2
Where once Paul saw heretics, now he sees brothers.
Where the world sees prisoners, beggers, and the unwanted, the Christian meets Christ.
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Matthew 25:35-40
Where the world sees money, riches, and security, the Christian sees decayed rust. And conversely, what the world today may see as sacrifice or poverty, the Christian sees as an invisible richness and abundance.
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
Matthew 6:19-20
Where the innskeepers sees a poor Jewish family, the wise men see a Savior and a King. What might to some today look like a dinner party at a house in the suburbs, is a gathering of the saints in a mighty temple of worship.
you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 2:5
Even in the parable of the Good Samaritan, seeing rightly precedes acting rightly. Much of modern preaching today about the Good Samartian revolves around the Christian duty to care for those around us. But the question asked to Jesus was not “how should I behave toward my neighbor” but rather “who is my neighbor”. And as the late Catholic priest Ivan Illich puts it, the answer of the parable is “My neighbour is who I choose, not who I have to choose”.3
Within the passage, we see that the virtue that Jesus is highlighting in the Samaritan is how he gazed upon the injured man and saw him as their neighbour:
Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.
Luke 10:31-33
Similarly, in his sermon Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis4 talks about the immense glory hidden within each soul and individual, if only we dare to see each other in the proper light:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
One mark of the Christian faith is to be able to see rightly, to assess value and perceive people as Jesus does.
To Gaze and To Behold
But so far, I’ve described these new modes of perception and seeing the world as fundamentally passive ones of observation. This is analogous to our modern understanding of physics which models the eye as a passive receptacle that receives light from external objects.
But until relatively recently, philosophers (before there was a distinction between science and philosophy) thought of the eye as an active agent, a source of light that imprints upon the object it gazes upon, and then brings back the substance of the object to the eye along the same path. And while it is a physically incorrect model, it is perhaps a useful one to understand what the Bible is saying about how our gaze and our perception are also active agents in shaping what kind of person we are.56
Because we have lost this conception of beholding, modern language in church often talks about “seeking” or “pursuing” God, through prayer or reading the Bible. But Scripture is far more direct, when it talks about how we are transformed quite literally by “looking” to Christ:
And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
2 Corinthians 3:18
And conversely, if we look to idols for our hope, we transform to become more like them, dead and lifeless:
The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
they have eyes, but do not see;
they have ears, but do not hear,
nor is there any breath in their mouths.Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.
Psalm 135:15-18
Similarly, the conception of the eye as a source of light, and the importance of how we gaze and behold the other, helps us understand what Jesus says about the effect of lust in the Sermon on the Mount:
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:27-29
Most exegesis focuses on how Jesus expands the sin of lust from action to intent and thought. But understanding the importance of the gaze of the beholder helps us understand lust not just as a discrete mental offense, but as a polluting influence on the “eye of the soul”, that we should commodify a person, laden with the “weight of glory”, into just a body of flesh.7
Similarly, later in the Sermon, Jesus uses this concept again more broadly:
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Matthew 6:22-23
Specifically, our gaze and attention is formative and directs our desires and the destinations our hearts long for.8
Similarly, Jesus talks about treasure, he does not just describe a difference in perception, but also warns that our perception, how we gaze upon and take stock of value in the world, forms our hearts and desires too.9
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19-21
Our perception is not just a passive filter for how we view the world, but it tunes and directs our desires as well.
Dating Apps
Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.
Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology
As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist — making the ratio-circle of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast!
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, Chapter 20
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Charles Horton Cooley
Hopefully at this point, I have at least somewhat convinced you that:
there are vast differences in how one can perceive the world and this perception is significant for one’s faith
our gaze and attention are not neutral but actively form and direct our hearts
I owe a great debt to many writers and thinkers who helped me imagine new ways of being in the world as a Christian (see footnotes). One quote in particular I want to highlight from James K.A. Smith, who talks more broadly how cultural liturgies i.e. habits shape our hearts:
We should be asking: What vision of human flourishing is implicit in this or that practice? What does the good life look like as embedded in cultural rituals? What sort of person will I become after immersed in this or that cultural liturgy? This is the process that we can describe as cultural exegesis.
Desiring the Kingdom, page 89
I think this perspective has tremendous application in many areas of Christian life, with perception and gaze as one dimension of personhood that is shaped by our habits or cultural liturgies (again, see footnotes).
But I wrote all this to help me articulate, mostly for myself, specifically why I don’t like dating apps.10
Seeing the Other
In some sense, Christian life is training for properly perceiving and seeing the world and the other people.11 It is through rightly seeing that we can rightly love and act.
But what do dating apps do? They train us to:
to construct an image of oneself through photos and engaging textual answers
and to narrowly view and judge others based through the same medium
I imagine dating apps as a keyhole, where one must contort themselves to fit into the shape, through the right pictures of themselves and witty responses to mundane questions, to be seen. And similarly, dating apps train us to look at people through this keyhole, to narrow our vision and field of gaze when we behold the other, into a narrow profile. And then judge and make decisions like “do I want to meet this person”, “Do I want to talk to this person”?
It might also seem like such a small thing, whether or not to meet with someone. But what can be more valuable, what greater gift is there, than the gift of one’s company and time? Yet through dating apps, we start the journey of “seeing and having compassion”, of “becoming one flesh”, not through a gaze that sees with love but a gaze that is directed through and by a dating app interface.12
The abundance of discourse on how to optimize your profile, what small changes on the app indicate, is an example of how the apps direct and shape your gaze in a very specific manner, rather than the eternal substance of what kind of people we are becoming. Rather than training our eyes to see that “eternal weight of glory”, we tune our hearts towards what we desire in “height, age, ethnicity”. How easy it is to treat these worldly trinkets as harmless diversions or necessary tools, when in truth they corrode our hearts and steal the greatest gift: to behold each other through God’s eyes!
The Standing-Reserve
It is not just that dating apps change individual peer-to-peer perceptions. They shape how we see people more broadly. By offering what appears to be an endless pool of potential partners, these apps encourage us to view people as a readily available resource rather than as full, unique individuals. To be concrete, a few phrases I associate with this:
“dating apps help you practice dating”
“[on meeting someone they hit off really well with] why not meet with few other people you matched with first and see if you like them more”
“dating apps are a sales funnel, where you move prospects down sales pipelines for conversion [to an exclusive, committed relationship]”
These lines may sound innocuous, but they reveal an underlying mindset that frames people as an unending supply, suggesting that every match can be used, evaluated, or replaced on a whim (rather than as a person). The philosopher Martin Heidegger describes this exact effect in his seminal essay on technology:
Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand] . . .
As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.
Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology
Martin Heidegger conceives of technology as creating a “standing-reserve,” where everything is ordered in such a way that it can be summoned and used on demand as a resource. Dating apps function similarly: they gather an infinite pool of profiles, lining them up in a uniform format so that each person, each profile, stands ready to be consumed. Worse yet, once we start seeing ourselves as the “orderer” of this standing-reserve—someone whose entire romantic hopes hinge on the next swipe—we ourselves become a resource to be extracted, just another profile at someone else’s disposal.
And I have seen friends who have been on the receiving end, used for a purpose [e.g. recovering from a break-up, for social companionship, for them to feel wanted] and then tossed away, left to piece themselves back together and wonder what it was all for.
Exiting Community
This idea that the “orderer” becomes part of the “standing-reserve” is another way of saying that dating apps presuppose the atomized individual. While the unprecedented surge in dating apps is a symptom of the decay in social institutions, including the church, it is also a self-reinforcing notion. The more we lean into dating apps, the more we ourselves take on that conception that human connection is mediated by an app, rather than through community.
It can be easy for Christians inside the church today to feel like they have nowhere else to turn. “How else will I meet someone, if not through a dating app?” And indeed, the mere existence of a potentially infinite dating app pool will always seem more tantalizing than the people in front of us, who are messy and human. But how can we see not just people rightly, but God’s vision for the church community rightly, if we accept dating apps as the sower of marriage, which is meant to be the mystery of Christ and the Church? Taking the convenient “exit” that dating apps provide, which is sometimes even endorsed within the church, is surrendering a part of our vision for the church community. Not because the purpose of church community is to help people find partners, but because we can be tempted to participate in fellowship with lowered expectations and one eye towards the exit.
Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation….
How can such a one fight? what is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of some action quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it's no wonder that instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead of serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation… And therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less
Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky
We are called to be vigilant, to be sober minded, to build up the church - God does not owe us anything, including a romantic relationship. But I am convinced that if we are faithful to God’s vision for the church, striving to behold people the way we were made, then all else will follow.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you
Matthew 6:33
If you want to see more posts from the Inklings section of this newsletter, you can subscribe and update your subscription preferences:
There are also plenty of examples of the converse: where God condemns sin as those who do not see rightly e.g.
They know not, nor do they discern, for he has shut their eyes, so that they cannot see, and their hearts, so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals; I roasted meat and have eaten. And shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?”
Isaiah 44:19-20
In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
2 Corinthians 4:4
Understanding that physically seeing and truly perceiving as different phenomena is common in Jesus warnings e.g. “seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear” (Matthew 13:13).
We see this distinction between different kinds of seeing and perceiving in Jesus’s healing of the blind men too.
And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. And he sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village.”
Mark 8:24-26
The first time Jesus asks, where the man responds “I see people”, uses the greek word blepō, which occurs 131x, and is the common phrase for seeing. But the second time when the man’s sight is fully restored and “he saw everything clearly”, it uses the much less common word emblepō (only occurs 12x), which adds a preposition that can together be translated as “to gaze closely”.
This particular word is also used to describe Jesus’s encounter with the rich young ruler (“And Jesus looked at him, loved him, and said “You lack one thing…”) and Jesus looking at Peter after Peter denies him three times (“And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter rememebered…”). Interestingly, it is also used to describe the angels rebuking the disciples in Acts 1 after Jesus ascension (“why do you stand looking into heaven”), with the implication they are too busy being in awe of Jesus ascension and looking to heaven for salvation to arrive, rather than acting out the great commission they were given.
The full quote from Ivan Illich:
Once, some thirty years ago, I made a survey of sermons dealing with this story of the Samaritan from the early third century into the nineteenth century, and I found out that most preachers who commented on that passage felt that it was about how one ought to behave towards one’s neighbour, that it proposed a rule of conduct, or an exemplification of ethical duty. I believe that this is, in fact, precisely the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out. He had not been asked, how should one behave towards one’s neighbour, but rather, who is my neighbour? And what he said, as I understand it, was, My neighbour is who I choose, not who I have to choose.”
Rivers North Of the Future, The Testament of Ivan Illich, Chapter I
Indeed, C.S Lewis loved fantasy because he believed that the faith of a child is inspired and awaken not by logical reasoning or a litany of duties, but by captivating their imagination to see the world beyond. As the saying goes, “If you want them to build a ship…teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”
This is also why I don’t enjoy Christian movies like “Best Christmas Pageant Ever”. They try to pigeonhole deep Christian meaning into mundane suburb drama. Their villains are shallow and their hero’s obvious. Indeed they violate the basic observation that Solshenitzyn made: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.
For more, see this video essay.
Much could also be written about how being fully known and seen by God similarly has a transformative effect e.g. “God turning His face upon us”
For instance, the myth of the Gorgon, who turns people to stone with her gaze, is an example of this active view of perception and the eye upon an object.
For instance, porn addicts often talk about how the way they see others, particularly their partners, and how they conceive of sex in the real world, is permanently altered.
We can see this in the physical world too: if your car starts skidding on ice, you regain control by “counter-steering” or “steering into the skid”. Part of this technique is to “look where you want to go”, as your body naturally responds and controls the car towards where your eyes are looking. The negative form of this is called “target fixation” where drivers or pilots who overly focus on an object of focus end up crashing into it.
It’s worth noting that while much of this has been negative, the converse is also true, not just of beholding God, but when we consider what it means to be image-bearers of God: that we might be the “light” that inspires and awakes dormant desires and faith in others.
note to self: the city-on-a-hill passage seems to suggest a different theory of perception than the traditional greek emissivity theory of the time? That the “light that shines in the darkness” is actively engaging the receiver, rather than the receiver being the active agent.
caveat: many people have found partners they love and care deeply off of dating apps. This is not a criticism of them or their relationship. But the success of their relationship does not necessarily absolve the dating apps along the way, just as any other potentially harmful practice or sin along the way in the relationship is not justified even if the end result is positive.
When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!
1 Corinthians 6:1-3
While the application in the letter is to the church appropriately recognizing the sin and evil of sexual immorality, Paul broadens it here to say that the end state of a Christian is to be able to properly judge, to assess and determine, the value and rightness of the world and even the higher things of angels.
It is of course true that a gaze is ultimately directed by the individual and the kind of gaze I am critiquing here also happens in real life. Many a young adult church group is plagued by this gaze, that assesses every newcomer as a potential romantic prospect, rather than as a brother or sister.
The distinction here is that while the individual can bear responsibility in the world for their gaze, dating apps enforce a certain gaze both for oneself and for the other, and reshapes our broader perception of humanity as a standing-reserve of matches, rather than as individuals.
One helpful analogy here: if you scroll through a guy’s instagram reels and its all innocuous videos of attractive girls, what does that tell you? Dating apps are no different in terms of how they shape our gaze.