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    Theology and Technology, Volume 1: Essays in Christian Analysis
    Theology and Technology, Volume 1: Essays in Christian Analysis
    Theology and Technology, Volume 1: Essays in Christian Analysis
    Ebook308 pages5 hours

    Theology and Technology, Volume 1: Essays in Christian Analysis

    By Wipf and Stock

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    Originally published nearly forty years ago as a spiritual successor to Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey's Philosophy and Technology, the essays collected in the two volumes of Theology and Technology span an array of theological attitudes and perspectives providing sufficient material for careful reflection and engagement. The first volume offers five general attitudes toward technology based off of H. Richard Niebuhr's five ideal types in Christ and Culture. The second volume includes biblical, historical, and modern theological engagements with the place of technology in the Christian life. This ecumenical collection ranges from authors who enthusiastically support technological development to those cynical of technique and engages the Christian tradition from the church fathers to recent theologians like Bernard Lonergan and Jacques Ellul. Taken together, these essays, some reproductions of earlier work and others original for this project, provide any student of theology a fitting entree into considering the place of technology in the realm of the sacred.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWipf and Stock
    Release dateJul 21, 2022
    ISBN9781666790696
    Theology and Technology, Volume 1: Essays in Christian Analysis

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      Theology and Technology, Volume 1 - Wipf and Stock

      Preface (1984)

      Carl Mitcham

      Jim Grote

      This volume continues an intellectual assessment of technology that began with Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey’s Philosophy of Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology (New York: Free Press, 1972) and has been extended into a number of bibliographies and various general studies. More immediately, it is the outgrowth of a symposium on Philosophy, Technology and Theology organized by Mitcham and Grote for the Society of Philosophy and Technology, and held in conjunction with the American Catholic Philosophical Association annual meeting in Toronto, April 20–22, 1979. Initial versions of the papers by Durbin, Fortin, Sun, Schuurman, and Sontag were prepared for this symposium—although Sontag’s was not actually delivered there. The paper by George Blair was contributed to a subsequent discussion of the thought of André Malet held under the auspices of the East Central Division of the ACPA in November, 1980, at the Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio. It was while editing these papers for publication in Research in Philosophy and Technology that Grote first made the suggestion—about which he has since expressed some misgivings, given the work it has caused him—that they be used as the nucleus for the present book.

      Because of its heritage, this collection is somewhat different in character than its philosophical predecessor, which in fact included a section of Religious Critiques. The present volume assumes the existence of that more classical set of texts. It seeks, with judicious selection from a literature of otherwise limited access, complemented by original work, to make a specific argument which is stated at some length in the first essays of each volume. Briefly put, this is that the central question, even in the philosophy of technology, is ultimately theological in character. Whereas the original anthology had tolerantly included religious issues within the scope of technology as a philosophical problem, the present collection wishes to turn the tables and present philosophical issues as the outgrowth of theological understandings. But here it is perhaps appropriate to indicate something of the personal circumstances behind such an idea.

      In the Preface to Philosophy and Technology, Mitcham and Mackey alluded to a personal philosophical commitment at the basis of their collection which, in religious form, is at the foundation of the present collection as well. The original philosophical commitment was that which in fact makes philosophy possible—that is to the primacy of theory over practice. In truth, because of its character, it is inaccurate to describe it as a commitment; it is a conviction born of reason, but held tenuously in the face of a world manifestly oriented in other directions. Religiously, this becomes a conviction of the primacy of the contemplative life over the active apostolate. In 1967, when the first book was being conceived, Mitcham was neither Catholic nor Christian, and he and Grote were unacquainted. In the early 1970s, Grote, through his involvement with the Catholic Worker movement, developed his own appreciation of the importance of the contemplative dimension of experience. The two became friends through providence as members for a time of a small experimental community near the Abbey of Gethsemani which sought to adapt the Western contemplative monastic tradition to family life. This work is thus part of an on-going pilgrimage to integrate the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of our lives. The ghost of Thomas Merton hovers over, without necessarily approving of, such efforts.

      Essay 1

      Technology as a Theological Problem in the Christian Tradition

      Carl Mitcham

      Technology is currently recognized as a social and as a philosophical problem—but only to some limited extent as a properly theological one. Theology has generally concentrated on analyzing an apparently contingent or disconnected series of moral problems obviously engendered by technology (industrial alienation, nuclear weapons, the social justice of development, biomedical engineering, mass media, etc.) without either systematically relating such specific issues or grounding them in more fundamental reflections on the relationship between Christian faith and technological reason.

      The present collection of original essays and translations proposes to initiate a comprehensive theological reflection in two ways: by indicating the basic issues of faith and reason as they are manifested anew in the interaction between Christianity and technology and by exploring themes which emerge in the theological reassessment of the Christian heritage from the perspective engendered by modern technological development.

      The limitation of this analysis to the Christian tradition can be explained on two grounds. Practically speaking, some restrictions simply have to be made. The subject of the relationship between religion as a whole and technology in general is just too broad, and too nebulous, to be fruitfully pursued at the present stage of theological discourse. Theoretically speaking, it seems reasonable to focus on the confrontation between Christianity and modern technology because of the close historical association between the two—an association which must not, however, be taken to speak for itself. The historical engagement between Christianity and technology is itself a question for theological analysis, in order to try to determine its essential and accidental features. Furthermore, it is by means of the prosecution of theological reflections on technology within specific religious traditions that more ecumenical reflection will eventually be made possible.

      1.

      The question of the relationship between Christianity and technology sounds conspicuously like a number of other questions. What is the relationship between Christianity and art? Christianity and science? Christianity and philosophy? Christianity and politics? Is there such a thing as a Christian art or science or philosophy or politics?

      Such questions have generally been subject to two inadequate kinds of answers. The first is to reply that, Yes, there is a Christian art. This art is identified with one whose subject matter is overtly Christian. The second is to reply that, No, there is not some specifically Christian art. There is only a Christian attitude toward art.

      The weakness of the first answer is exposed by the rich history of Christian art, which exhibits an enormous diversity in style; and by the fact that many devout artists have dealt with Christian themes in quite subtle, indirect, or allusive ways. Christian themes often shade imperceptibly into general human themes. Indeed, this is exactly what one would expect, if one believes that Christianity is a true response to certain fundamental aspects of the human

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