Thinking Theology and Technology, Part II

Whew! This is turning out to be harder than I thought.  Here is the second section in my draft of a "theology of technology."  Still only at the "thinking out loud stage," but here's what I got:

II. Christ and the Powers: Technology Disarmed, Technology Redeemed

From the vantage point we gain when we view “technology” as one of “the powers,” we are better able to see how the Gospel of Christ informs our response and redefines our relationship to it. After all, though the Bible says very little about Facebook, it has very much to say about “the Powers” and the way Christians ought to relate to them.

In Colossians 1:16, on the one hand, Paul affirms the Powers as a part of God’s good created order, insisting that all things (and he specifically includes “the powers and the principalities” in the list) were created by and for Christ. This moves us out of black-and-white, good-or-bad dualisms when it comes to things like developments in social media or the ubiquity of the Internet. It allows us instead to recognize and affirm the positive potential off all such technologies, while at the same time insisting that they are not “ultimate,” that Christ is the Lord of world, even of the world- wide-inter-web. (See also Ephesians 1:21, where Christ is pictured enthroned in the heavenlies, “far above all ‘power’.”)

On the other hand, of course, the Bible is hardly naive when it comes to the fallenness of the Powers. Paul states quite strongly that “the Powers and Principalities” are ranged against us in the struggle of the Christian life (Ephesians 6:12), and he implies just as strongly that in their fallenness the Powers do not recognize the Lordship of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:8). This keeps us from blindly accepting technology as “given” or “spiritually neutral,” and forces us to acknowledge that if they are to serve Christ, “the Powers” must be both dethroned and redeemed.

This brings us, at last, to the Cross of Christ, allowing us to see how the Gospel actually shapes our relationship to things even as seemingly mundane as the text-message. In what is probably the pivotal text for any theology of technology, Colossians 2:15 describes the redemptive work of the cross and then applies it specifically to the Powers. “God has disarmed the powers” he writes. “He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them through the cross.” The word translated “triumphing” here (thriambeuō) is actually a technical term for one of the special victory parades a Roman General would make through the city of Rome after a successful military campaign. They would lead their troops, their chariots, and especially their prisoners of war in a victorious procession while the citizens cheered in triumphant celebration. Paul applies the potent symbolism of such a parade to the work of the Cross, indicating that through his death and resurrection, Christ has stripped “the Powers” of their idolatrous claim on our lives, nullifying their influence over us, and making them now to serve his purposes for them (in much the same way a defeated prisoner of war displayed in a public “triumph” served the political purposes of the Roman Empire).

Because the “disarming of the Powers” is so abstract but also so essential to any theology of technology, Berkhof’s analysis of Colossians 2:15 is worth quoting here: “Christ has ‘disarmed’ the Powers. The weapon ... is struck out of their hands. This weapon was the power of illusion, their ability to convince men that they were the divine regents of the world, ultimate certainty and ultimate direction, ultimate happiness and the ultimate duty for small, dependant humanity. Since Christ, we know this is illusion. We are called to a higher destiny ... we stand under a greater Protector. ... Unmasked, revealed in their true nature, [the Powers] have lost their mighty grip on men (sic.). The cross has disarmed them; wherever it is preached, the unmasking and the disarming of the Powers takes place" (ibid, 39).

To spell this out in practical terms, we might say it like this: every modern “technology,” by its very nature as a human effort to order our life together, has an unseen spiritual dimension to it that exerts a very real spiritual influence over our lives. This influence is evident, for instance, when we accept new technologies unquestioningly as indispensable to human life, or when we depend on them for meaning and identity, or when we allow them to dictate the terms of our relationships and the means of our social interactions, or when we trust in them for a kind of “salvation” (i.e. to hold society together and keep us from sliding into chaos). In the death and resurrection of Christ, God, has exposed all such claims (technology is ultimate, it’s a source of meaning, it’s a “saviour” from chaos, etc.) as the illusions that they are, showing us instead that Christ is ultimate, that life in him is the source of meaning, and that he alone is saviour. Having thus disarmed the Powers like this, technology among them, the Gospel frees us to relate to the Powers, technology included, in ways that are: 1) redemptive (i.e. affirming their goodness and potential), 2) realistic (i.e. accepting their limits and acknowledging their subservience to Christ), and 3) intentional (i.e. discerning of their “spirit” and wisely selective in how we will use them).

In this way, our redemptive, realistic and intentional use of technology becomes a concrete instance of what Paul was talking about in Ephesians 3:10, when he said, “God’s intent in Christ was that, through the church, his manifold wisdom should be made known to the powers and authorities in the heavenly realms.”