Is Theology a Technology?

This post finds its origins in a tweet:

“Theology is a technology.” – @IdeasDoneDaily /// Chewing on that. #newmediaproject #chsocm

— David L Hansen (@rev_david) February 23, 2015

After a bit of reflection, I had a response:

@expatminister @rev_david @IdeasDoneDaily Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say that theology is NOT a technology. #newmediaproject #chsocm

— Clint Schnekloth (@Schnekloth) February 23, 2015

However, the question has left me puzzling over the two terms. Even if equating theology with technology, or labeling theology as a kind of technology, fails the test of helpfulness, the comparison itself does clarify the two terms. In fact, it sent me scurrying to develop a better definition of technology so I could articulate precisely why I believe theology is not a technology.

At the most basic level, theology is not a technology because technology, traditionally construed, is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Technology is an applied science. Theology is closer to, in Aristotelian terms, either theory or poesis. Theology is creative, a kind of intellectual “seeing.”

So we might say that you can have a theology of technology. And technology can influence what kinds of theologies emerge. But at least classically construed, to call theology a technology is to confuse things the Greek philosophers helpfully distinguished one from another.

At this point, I run into a problem. To really think through technology and theology, I know I have to deal with Heidegger. But dealing with Heidegger is awkward, on many levels. Of course there is the issue of his complicity with National Socialism. Then there is simply the problem that Heidegger is not easy to understand.

That being said, there is no getting around Heidegger’s meditations on technology as they relate to modern life. I may be oversimplifying Heidegger here (remember, I do not always find him completely easy to understand), but I think we could say that for Heidegger, the issue with technology is that it constricts our view of the world. We have begun to see the whole world technologically, the whole world and even human beings as simply raw materials for technical operations (for a great summary of Heidegger’s thought on technology, see http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/understanding-heidegger-on-technology).

Perhaps we might better argue that technology is replacing theology in modern thought, or at least that we are turning all of what used to amount to theology into technique.

The origins of this shift, at least in North America, can be traced back to revivalism. Charles Finney, one of the great 19th century evangelists, is (in)famous for applying scientific technique to revival. In his Lectures on Revival, he wrote that revival “is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constitutional means.”

The shift here in Finney is from the content of preaching and worship to the procedure and technique. It isn’t that Finney completely abandoned the content of the faith–it’s simply that he began to approach the effectiveness of revival through technique, the right measures at the right time to effect the desired result.

Much of modern evangelism in North America simply takes the measures Finney developed for granted. North American Christians live and breathe a Christian movement that has for the most part adopted this shift from theology to technique.

To label theology a technology becomes problematic precisely in the Heideggerian sense, because Heidegger feared (rightly) that our technological worldview results in approaching everything as a “standing reserve” we can appropriate for our purposes. If theology is a technology, it is just one more thing among things, one more tool at our disposal to pick up or discard as we wish.

What Heidegger accomplishes in his lectures on technology is a reversal of terms. If technology becomes all encompassing, then all our attempts to step outside of the technological frame fail because we are still applying technology to step outside of it. For Heidegger, technology is one, but only one, way of revealing, of bringing truth out.

The revealing of truth isn’t a half-bad definition of theology, and if that’s the definition of theology, that’s a very good reason not to label theology a technology. Theology contains technology rather than the other way around, we might say. Even Finney, who relied heavily on the technologies of revival, likely believed that it was not the techniques themselves that revealed the truth, but rather the techniques became tools through which the self-revealing of truth might happen (Lord have mercy, that sounds Barthian, but I hope you get the drift).

We are left with some rather perplexing considerations, not all of which can be worked out easily. It isn’t entirely clear what technology is, or what theology is, which is precisely why students of both are always again and again debating the definition of the fundamental terms. In an era when technology takes up greater and greater amounts of our reflection, and dominates our daily life, the question of the relationship between theology and technology is essential.

But let’s not equate the two until we have a better understanding of whether one contains the other.