Twitter is such a limited medium.

Reducing complex ideas to a 140 character “tweet” can even for the best be tough. Many of us often want that re-tweetable provocative tweet.

We crave the tweet that gets the most impact possible.

As we get more followers we desire to perform better tweets to really grab people’s attention. We are even prone to use purposefully provocative words.

Sometimes this can make us tweet something that may be right theologically, may be right spiritually, but wrong in gracious application to sinners. Some of the writers that I love best use very measured words. In most writing words and sentences exist generally in the context of a larger work that clarifies the sentence or sentences in question. Tweeting complex ideas and situation can lead be problematic.

Twitter was designed as a 140 character method of open dialog with anyone anywhere in the world. Twitter has though for some degraded to a virtual bulletin board. When Twitter is used as a form of one way or predominantly one way communication the social ability to dialog with the person is gone. Dialog dissolves into monologue that may be counter productive and cause unnecessary division.

As a fellow twitterer I think using twitter can be incredibly beneficial and incredibly dangerous. It easily allows for the removal of the contextual element of stringing sentences, paragraphs, and complex ideas together. This is dangerous. It allows for sweeping oversimplification.

In the Christian context it allows for legalism to creep in and choke out the beautiful flower of grace. It also allows for libertinism to creep in and replace the natural law which God intended to order the universe when we tweet without context theologically related ideas.

For the Christian community, we all need to quit tweeting provocative one liners in favor of thought out blogging perhaps using twitter as a place to do teasers. Thought out and well struggled with questions shows a depth to character and passion to get the gospel right. It also remove the pension to tweet something that is asinine.