A fair amount of writing seems to regard technology as the enemy of culture. There is an issue here, but in my view this is not an accurate way of expressing it. Technology as applied science and now with particular reference to computers, is a very broad category as well, too broad to be held responsible in symbolic or causative terms for all the dangers of contemporary existence or all the promise once attributed to scientific progress.

Technology is part of culture, high, popular and simply how we do things around here. Culture is about how things as they are, not just about how we think they should be. I do not believe that "high" culture as in arts, music and literature, is intrinsically of greater value than "pop" culture, though I do have preferences!

The late  David Lochhead, theologian and pioneer of the use of the internet in Christian ministry, provided a  framework for talking about the potential for good and evil of Information Technology. This still usefully applies to discussion of technology in general. See my review of his Shifting Realities, Reality, 1999.

My articles The Information Superhighway as a Missiological Tool of the Trade, (Missiology,  January 1999), and on Towards a Theology of Technology (below) draw on Lochhead to encourage critical engagement and suggest that we should seek to understand the differences technology makes and the ways in which those differences can be less ambiguous.

Towards a Theology of Technology.

Presbyterian Minister's Journal, Candour, April 2005. (minor edits 10/11/2005)

Technology and theology meet pastorally when sympathy is needed for the owners of data lost in crashed hard drives, liturgically when new sound systems and data projectors become sanctuary furniture, and ethically when boundaries are strained by new medical possibilities and techniques, bandwidth poverty leaves information captive in the hands of the powerful, and the destructive power of new means of warfare outstrips any possible benefit of its use. In these situations the power of technology is creating loss, meeting needs, and changing what is possible. It is both addressing and exacerbating economic, cultural and political inequalities.

A theology of technology could be expected to say something about technology in the light of our understanding of God, and something about God in the light of our understanding of technology. Our use of technology, like other forms of Christian praxis, will also say something about what we believe about God – what intentions and uses do we have for the things we make, and why do we make this stuff anyway?

A Christian understanding of God might remind us that the things we make are tools and are not ends in themselves, that they can be for good or for evil, and that the temptations arising from the fact that things we construct easily take the role of idols are often realized. We need to remember that people do matter more than things. We might also remember that technology is a result of creativity which is in turn part of the image of God in ordinary people, that although the Bible is more about other dimensions of life, Jesus was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter, his disciples sailed boats, caught fish with nets they made and mended, and Paul could support himself making tents.

Our use of technology and our appreciation of it may also say something about our understanding of God. The idea of the worldwide web may echo an idea of God. The experience of loss of data that was not saved is not a completely crass analogy of what Christians have often said about judgement and salvation. Creating possibilities for electronic and social communication may say something about a belief that human interaction is a value enhanced by our sense that God has communicated to us in Christ, and that in mission communication within the Trinity spills out in love to the world. The application of technology to worship and medicine indicates our belief in those things which says we also want to maximise their potential through the means that are available to us.

The late David Lochhead, professor of Theology at St Andrew’s College, Vancouver, was an early adopter of information technology and a pioneer in linking people in ministry through the internet. He also thought theologically about technology and his short book, Shifting Realities, WCC, 1997, is still worth reading. Technology has changed, but his theological framework encouraged people to take sin and creativity seriously, and avoid seeing technology as such as either demonic or messianic.

Others have not been so balanced. Those for whom technology represents the artefacts of industrialisation, pollution and war, such as Jacques Ellul, seem to have had difficulty seeing technology as anything other than a product of greed and an enemy of culture. Ellul’s concerns need to be heeded, but although his concern was as much for the proliferation of belief in technique as it was for the spread of technology, it was unfortunate that he appeared to work with the idea that technology was not so much a dimension of culture to be tamed, but a mechanical inhuman enemy of the human to be deplored. However the issues with technology are surely to do with the values and purposes to which it is put. It seems to me that it is not technology as a category of human activity that was the heart problem of Ellul's concerns, but people and what they want to get particular technologies to do for them. Technology as such is hard to avoid if you read books and newspapers, eat meals cooked by gas or electricity, value clean water and good sanitation and expect public transport and telephones to work.

Technology - mechanical, electrical, electronic, medical or military - can be very intimidating to those who find it confusing and a beast they somehow never manage to tame.  Those for whom cell phones and computers mean fear and confusion need much more sympathy than they sometimes get. People have different gifts. One of the things which a theology of technology also needs to say is that God still loves people for whom this is just not their thing at all. We might add that whether they are sympathetic and understanding or not, they, like Ellul, may also be the very voices we most need to heed if the potential for good is more to be realised that the possibilities of evil.

John Roxborogh

Jaques Ellul, The Technological Society, New York, NY: Vintage, 1974.

David Lochhead, Shifting realities: information technology and the church, Risk book series 75. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1997.

John Roxborogh, The Information Superhighway as a Missiological Tool of the Trade. Missiology 27 (1), 1999, 117-122.