Even before cloning became common, physicist Richard Seed became a media sensation when he vowed to move forward with experiments on human cloning, despite widespread secular and religious concern over such human experimentation. Seed’s bold declaration sparked intense worldwide debate and a political campaign to reign in “scientific adventurism.”
Author David Noble believes we might have ignored a more important matter: Seed’s religious worldview. Seed told National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, in early 1998:
God intended man to become one with God. We are going to become one with God. We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming ‘one with God.’”
With statements like that coming from the scientific community, is it any wonder that Christians are wary of technology? Note the similarity between Seed’s statement and the enticements of the serpent to Eve in Genesis chapter 3:
He [the serpent] said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:1a-5, ESV)
Since the Fall, we have sought to be autonomous. Our sin nature puts us at rebellion with God, and without redemption, man will use any tool at his disposal to facilitate his rebellion. The tool may be as simple as fruit, or complex as an electron microscope. In our times, scientists are happy to make statements like Seed’s; human achievement brings mankind closer to its “God-like” place in the universe. Such statements naturally strike fear in Christian hearts, though, causing us to wonder if many of the newly developed technological advances aren’t more evil than good. It is easy to draw false analogies between such statements, and many do.
So how should Christians address the technological changes going on around us, especially the advances in communications technology, ever present in our homes, churches and communities? How do we know when to embrace a change before us, and when to hold on to what is familiar and traditional?
Fear Not, Change Will Always Be With You
Ours is not the first generation to question the morality of new technologies. Two hundred years ago the Luddite movement sprung up in England when disenfranchised workers tried to destroy the factory machinery that was making their jobs obsolete. The April issue of WIRED magazine, in its defense of video games, chronicled what people said about several emerging technologies in their day: In 1909 movie theaters were described as a place where “depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children … GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the ‘moving pictures’.” In 1926 the Knights of Columbus wondered if the telephone made men lazier, disrupted home life, and discouraged the practice of visiting friends.
Christians have the added task of asking not only would new technologies benefit society as a whole, but can they be used in a way to glorify and serve God. Quentin Schultze, a professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin College, believes a thoughtful Christian approach to new technology starts with avoiding a knee-jerk reaction.
“The key for believers is adapting new technologies faithfully to their lives,” says Schultze. “Not merely rejecting the new technologies as if they are entirely evil, or adopting them mindlessly the way the rest of the culture is using them.” What questions should Christians ask themselves about their use of new technology? “What is ‘different’ about our use of technology? What ‘marks’ us as more discerning, careful, loving users?”
And how do we determine what exactly is technology when it is everywhere we look? In his book Transforming Our Days, Richard Gaillardetz, associate professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, says that
[T]echnology can no longer be viewed as neutral entity that can be used for good or evil. It has entered into the very fabric of our lives. In fact, technology’s ability to influence us so profoundly lies in its pervasive “hiddenness”; we are often blind to the subtle ways it shapes our view of, and interaction with, our world.
A Guide for Christian Techies
But we must root out this “hiddenness” of the technologies in our day-to-day lives and weigh them on the scales of our Christian faith. In his book Habits of the High-tech Heart, Schultze lays out a six part approach to garnering the benefits of technology in ways consistent with the Christian faith. According to Schultze our use of technology must show:
Discernment. The rampant thirst for information is not especially productive in our lives. We must know the difference between information and wisdom. Real ‘knowing’ requires intimate knowledge, ‘whereas informationalism’ only makes the sum of what we know more superficial.
Moderation. The quest for faster and faster information is not so much the means to virtue, as it is a route to greater background noise in our lives. We must guard against technology becoming a trivial distraction.
Wisdom. We must maintain good judgment by listening to the moral authority of scripture and religious tradition, which are grounded in the transcendent. Tradition reminds us of the big picture, the meta-narrative of life in contrast to the background noise of technological change.
Humility. We cannot put too much hope in technology to bring us problem-free lives. Christians must not indulge in the hubris of mankind.
Authenticity. The internet offers many opportunities to communicate disingenuously. In a digital world, Christians must set a high standard for truth and integrity, holding our public and private instructions to the same standards.
Diversity. Cyber-culture must give a voice not only to celebrities and promoters, but to the marginalized voices of informational society.
Like any tool, new technology helps us order our world for the glory of God. Or as Richard Gaillardetz puts it:
[W]e must resist the temptation to treat technology and Christian living as implacable foes. In profound ways the Christian religion and technology share more than might wish to admit…Consider that…the Christian economy is articulated in a basic narrative: humanity is created in the image and likeness of God and given stewardship over the created order.
Technology, in both its simple and complex forms, represents man’s charge to take dominion over God’s creation when used properly.
No Redemption
Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said, “All the celebrated technological achievements of progress do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.” The Jewish holocaust of World War II and the gulags of the former Soviet Union have merely given way to the slaughter of innocents in Sudan, the death camps of North Korea, the persecution of Christians in China. Technology has certainly not cured man’s ills. And it will not redeem his fallen nature.
“We cannot have a false messianic hope in technology,” says John Jewell, director for instructional technology and distance learning at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. “Putting a copy of the four spiritual laws on the internet will not bring pagans to their knees, [any] more than it does in print.”
Jewell has been advising ministry and church leaders on the best ways to implement technology for years now. He believes that church leaders must make sure they intentionally connect technology to the mission and ministry of church. Says Jewell,
“People respond to the gospel message when technology is used transform cultural experience into a spiritual lesson, not when they are overwhelmed with the media.”
An overconfidence in the power of technology to transform lives will not help believers communicate the Gospel message. “Rushing to implement new technologies in our churches just because it is available will not help us,” says Jewell.
“Christians must recognize that with new technologies comes the promise of liberty and prosperity,” says Albert Borgmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Montana and author of Power Failure. “There is reality in the fact that technology makes our lives better. Email, for example . . .”
“And yet,” Borgmann continues, “underneath that freedom there is a poverty. We can lose connection with people. Kind of like when we diet, we crave empty calories hungering for more, but the hunger is for the wrong thing. We crave more news, entertainment, more thrills. . . That’s where we can fall into ... captivity.”
A Tech-Heavy Future
The head of consumer electronics giant Philips once told the magazine Economist that “consumers want to be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, with the maximum control and freedom and with minimum effort” saying his firm was developing products with this goal in mind. Christianity Today writer Andy Crouch notes that these attributes rest with the Almighty and that Philips statement did not include the business of suffering. “Why would an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, maximally comfortable, minimally encumbered being need a savior,” asks Crouch.
No technology can bring that level of “success” to man, but technology is not inhospitable to faith in the wider sense, says Albert Borgmann. “It is not antagonistic to religion but it can appear to make religion irrelevant and unnecessary,” says Albert Borgmann.
Technology can be an invaluable help in storytelling and communicating with people says John Jewell. He adds, “we are called to tell the ‘old, old story of Jesus and his love,’ not to tell the old, old lecture. Technology, used properly, can help the story seem more meaningful.”
“Think of our technologically driven culture as an aquarium,” says Jewell. “My generation is watching the aquarium from the outside. The un-churched are already inside this aquarium. Our children and grandchildren won’t be watching this aquarium from the outside, they will need to jump in and swim if they are going reach those people with the Gospel. We ignore technology at our own peril.” Future pastors, says Jewell, must understand our tech-savvy culture to developed the proper frame of reference to address coming generations.
“To be a virtuous people in the high-tech world,” writes Quentin Schultze in Habits of the High-tech Heart, “is to be neither moralists or pragmatists but rather sojourners who humbly seek goodness in an eternal adventure that began before we were born and will continue after we die.”
