Innovation And The Image of God: Why we Love to Build and Share

The Open Source Software community includes thousands of people who love to create, and share generously.? It has unleashed a remarkable wave of human-powered innovation. Int he world of voice and telecom Communications technology space, nearly all communications providers are routing phone calls and connecting video sessions with systems built on free, open-source components. FreePBX and Kamailio, for examples, are under the hoods of many of the major telecom providers around the world.

A man will put loving labor into some hobby that can never bring him any economically adequate return. Dorothy Sayers

I got my start in Open Source around 1991 when I started using using Linux. By 1997, I had the privilege of meeting Richard Stallman -- one of the movement's founding figures -- who worked as a researcher and programmer in the AI lab at MIT. He built and gave away many of the everyday tools used to run the millions of Internet servers running today in the form of the "GNU" package set that underpins much of Linux. Why do people freely donate their time to develop software they cannot directly profit from?

To my mind, as a Christian, the free, open-source movement actually resonates with how we were designed: to build great things, to shape and to cultivate. When we commit new code on GitHub to improve a project, we aren't just polishing some files; we're actively creating, refining and sharing a wider cultural endeavor.

Another Open Source pioneer is Linus Torvalds, who developed the Linux kernel that led to the operating systems that run most Internet servers, Android phones, and millions of other tiny devices. In 1992, early in his development of the Linux Operating System, Linux Torvalds gave an interview where he reflected on Linux as a creator:

I think Linux does what I was looking for pretty well. There are details I dislike in the kernel, but the basic ideas have worked well, and there are no major ugly warts in the Linux design. So in that way it is kind of a dream system - just enough problems to keep up the interest, and keep it evolving. No program is ever perfect, and operating systems are interesting programs: there are a lot of things you have to keep track of, and a lot of different ways you can solve the problems.

You can hear and see how he loved his project. The novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), one of the first women to graduate from Oxford University, captured a similar spark in her World War II-era essay "Why Work?".? She describes a spark that inspires the work of Richard Stallman and Linux Torvalds when she wrote:?

A man will put loving labor into some hobby that can never bring him any economically adequate return. His satisfaction comes, in the godlike manner, from looking upon what he has made and finding it very good.

In the Christian worldview, humans were made to be cultivators and co-creators, following the pattern of God the creator. In the book of Genesis, attributed to Moses, this purpose is often referred to as the "Creation Mandate." I want to mention three key bits: the Image of God; Stewardship; and Cultivating Work.

The Image of God

Christianity says that, in many significant ways (though not all), every human bears God's image because God made us this way. Moses records that the creator God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." One of those ways we are like God is through our ability and desire to do good things, and to work.? We can accomplish creative, constructive tasks only because we rely on the air God provides and the food He supplies. Through His ongoing work in our lives, we can also recover certain aspects of His character -- like selfless love -- described in the Christian teaching as "Fruit of the Spirit." Yet some qualities remain exclusive to God alone, such as His complete control over creation, and sovereignty over the future.?

Stewardship

Stewardship refers to our responsibility to manage created things wisely. Moses records that the creator, God, saying, "And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." (Genesis 1:26) In other words, humans were entrusted with care and oversight of the world.?

Work & Cultivation

God created a work environment, and put man into it. Moses's book says, "The LORD [the name of the creator God] God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." (Genesis 2:15) Later, God has Adam give names to all the animals God had created -- studying and describing their differences.

Christian Theologian Ian Hart describes it this way:

Exercising royal dominion over the earth as God’s representative is the basic purpose for which God created man. . . . Man is appointed king over creation, responsible to God the ultimate king, and as such expected to manage and develop and care for creation, this task to include actual physical work.” [Ian Hart, “Genesis 1:1–2:3 as a Prologue to the Book of Genesis,” Tyndale Bulletin 46, no. 2 (1995): 322]

From this viewpoint, humanity's work originally drew on both physical and intellectual effort - the tending of a garden, and the analysis and naming of animals. This is a cultural task, and a scientific one. Both activities reflect a creative mandate. (See Theology of Work Commentary; Hendrickson; 2015)

Historically, Christians have taught that the first humans thrived in their creative work. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430), a famous early Christian teacher, wrote:

Although man was placed in paradise so as to work and guard it, that praiseworthy work was not toilsome. For the work in paradise is quite different from the work on the earth to which he was condemned after the sin. The addition “and to guard [or keep] it” indicated the sort of work it was. For in the tranquility of the happy life, where there is no death, the only work is to guard what you possess.?

By "guarding," Augustine suggests, humans were meant to remain within God's design and trust Him fully. However, people ultimately chose their own judgment over God's design, introducing rebellion -- what Christianity calls "sin". Like bad actors who choose to misuse your software and blame you when it breaks, humans have not managed and followed God's design.

In that way it is kind of a dream system - just enough problems to keep up the interest, and keep it evolving. Linus Torvalds on Linux, October 1992

Dorothy Sayers sheds further light on the Christian concept of work, in her efforts to wake us up from an economy of wastefulness, greed, and accepting drudgery:

Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Many Christians will say that our work is sacred because it is an act that reflects our Creator. Work that merely is done to please the public or earn a paycheck, and not because it is an expression of your gifts and abilities, is much less satisfying. Even if you don't accept the Christian viewpoint, you can sense this innate joy of doing great work, for good reasons, for the beauty of doing it well.

Sayers argued that true Christianity calls us to excellence in our vocation, yet religious communities (even well-intentioned Bible teachers) can sometimes reduce faith to moral policing and miss the richness of creation and cultivation. She warns:?

How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined [in the 1940s] to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Augustine and Sayers both illustrate that a consistent Christian view, over millennia, is that work is central to the human purpose. Our work and labor honor our Creator. Creating software that can be shared - whether commercially or at no cost - is a powerful example of humanity's God-given drive to create and cultivate. And whether you craft code, slides, spreadsheets, or tables, or train human brains, you should expect to find deep satisfaction in doing work that reflects who you are.?

But, as Code & Cosmos has highlighted, things are not always perfect. They often go pretty badly! Humans bring our self-centered "mental malware" to our projects. We barely care about the API documentation of our Creator and integrate with it so badly that we cause life to malfunction. Christianity teaches that the God who made us continues to care for us and has provided a way to restore our broken relationship with Him, through the successful work accomplished by Jesus (born 3 BC). In that hope, we can pursue our creative calling with confidence, knowing that our labor -- done well -- echoes the very nature of our Creator.

Would you like to talk more? I'd be glad to chat. Feel free to send me a note here on LinkedIn.

Going to any telecom tech conferences? I'd love to meet up. I plan to make a stop at these upcoming events: 

* ITEXPO - Ft Lauderdale, February 2025
* Mobile World Congress - Barcelona, March 2025
* CCA Cloud Connections - St Petersburg, April 2025