I believe technology to be a very powerful and important tool for the Church, but as Christians we must also be careful of how and what we embrace in regards to technology. That in the process we don’t become slaves to its means, but rather that we use technology as a transformative and redemptive agent for God’s Kingdom.
Recently I have been having more and more conversations with my friend Wess Daniels, whom I know from Fuller, and who I would on occasion meet up with to grab coffee as we pushed our daughters through Pasadena in their strollers.
Wess is an important and much needed voice in the way of technology and the Church. We are working on developing some online conversations in this area, but in the meantime, please read his article:
Technology as a Powerful Practice (Part 1).
If both the church and technology can be understood as potentially opposing powerful-practices how ought the church interact with technology? The first option is to treat technology as a commodity. We embrace as consumers whatever the latest and greatest gadget is in the name of utility and relevance; utility because it can help bring people in, relevance because irrelevance is the single greatest fear for the church-as-a-people-of commodity. Second, the church can seek to manage technology and keep it under control. The problem with both these options is that they do not recognize the implications of technology as a power and will themselves be reconfigured for the ends necessary of what we could half-jokingly call the imago tech rather than the imago Dei.
The third possibility is avoidance and/or ignorance. In either case this view operates under fallacy that we can remain untouched by “culture” and that maintaining group identity through isolation is the way forward. This is a reversal of the first view. The strength of this position is that it recognizes the power of technology but does not discern technology as an institution. If technology is an institution, a powerful-practice, it is in the air we breathe, we cannot escape its broad-sweep. The final option is to parry technology through participating in it but reorder it under the reign of God. This group acknowledges the universality of technology within the world, but resists its tendencies to reconfigure and dominate life under its particular ends. In one way, you might say this group remains indifferent in their attitude towards technology. They resist through engaging with technology but in a manner that rejects its own end goal and instead joins up with God’s redemptive work within the system.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
rhett – good post & quote. Although I’m intrigued where this comes from, particularly because I fear it is overly simplistic, setting up a few straw man to create the never questioned, always accepted “via media” without giving a concrete understanding of what that is. Particularly at the end:
“They resist through engaging with technology but in a manner that rejects its own end goal and instead joins up with God’s redemptive work within the system.”
This implies that there is some understanding that technology has an “end” goal. I’m interested to know what that is believed to be. If we don’t know the “end goal” of technology in this scenario, we’ll be hard pressed to reject it. What’s also funny, and maybe this is semantics, but there’s been an elimination of the concept of God’s end, unless it’s the implied reconciliation of all things. One of the great losses of modernity which has carried over into post-modernity in a huge way, is the loss of an end goal, the loss of telos.
So, I think we have to come to grips with what the end goal of technology is and compare it to the end goal of God in order to accurately resist it in the way described by Wess. Map that out baby and you’ve got an amazing bestseller on your hands.
Don – thanks for the comment. Sorry I didn’t go into more detail on the ends of technology, that is something I will be sure to develop more clearly as I continue to work on this. And I completely agree that a telos was dropped during the Enlightenment Project and post-modernity has struggled to regain that.
Basically, by naming technology as a power I believe we open the discussion up to the fact that it does have an end. I don’t know if there is only one end, or multiple, and I am not sure I can say for sure which one(s) I think are most accurate but I can say that I see four areas being effected by it: Time/Space, the Physical, Consumerism/Industry and Globalization.
Ellul is very clear that he sees efficiency as the ends of technology. McClendon (in “Ethics”) points out that the key feature in Ellul’s thinking is that “technique” is both a means and an end (cf. 273-274).
One example I can give is the iPhone. First, of course, as a phone and web device it is a means of communication. But in line with the third stage of consumerism, or what Zizek and others calls cultural-consumerism, there is an emotional and psychological attachment to the consumer object. That is owning an iPhone acts as an end in itself, it fulfills an “emotional” need created by cultural-consumerism.
I think this should be enough to at least make the point that this is an area for deeper exploration.
Thanks again for the comment!
Great stuff guys.
Telos is important to think about. And I like your thoughts on this Wess.
Zizek’s thoughts on “cultural consumerism” are pretty fascinating to me. And the i-phone is a great example.
I think there is a lot of dialogue happening in this area, and I think the more we discuss it, the more fruitful the conversation will be.
thanks for commenting…
rhett
Rhett, this is great stuff. Thanks for being a part of this ever-increasing interest in technology.
Keep it up.
Started blogging in August of 2006 (my first post was regarding Last.fm) but not consistently. Posted here and there sporadically until I finally started doing it with real consistency in January of 2008. So really I've been doing it for just one year now.
As to why… I'm actually in the process of writing a post on that. I'll shoot you a link once complete.