A church sign I passed every day coming back from SXSW
In several of the sessions at SXSW Interactive presenters suggested that Christianity is anti-technology at best, completely Luddite at worst and generally anti-futurist. Based on the image above I can see why. These claims are yet another indicator that we live in a post-Christian world. If that is a new term for you, it simply means that the central assumptions that characterized Western culture for centuries because of the formative power of the Christian Church are gradually Iosing cultural authority. In the U.S. this has been happening since the 1930s and has been happening rapidly since the 1960s. But just because we live in a world we can label “post-Christian” does it mean that Christian faith is anti-technology and anti-futurist? I do not believe so for these reasons:
We Remain God’s Creatures
Even the greatest advances of human technology cannot unlock the fundamental questions of life and death. How and when does life begin? How do we prevent death? However advanced our medical technologies, we cannot transcend this fundamental, human limit. We are not even close and I don’t think we ever will be. We can replace ourselves with robotics, but we cannot sustain our existence “as is.” Whether God or Nature, we are ultimately dependent on something Other that delimits both life and death. Since we all abide within these limits and share these dependencies we all stand on level ground relative to the possibilities technologies can offer toward human striving.
Technologies Can Be Used Toward Amazing Ends
It is fairly self-evident that human technologies can help people. Medical technolgies, mechanical technologies, and computing technologies have drastically improved human lives around the globe over the centuries. The value of these technologies for social good resonate with the Christian call to neighbor love. Christian technical creativity can (and does) harness contemporary tools and methodologies to serve others. Further, an approach to technology rooted in the end of serving others is helpful in (a) innovating new technologies as needs and challenges arise and (b) bringing a humility to technologican pursuits, emphasizing their good use as opposed to their potential tragic uses.
God Draws the Future Into The Present
Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann draws upon the philosophy of hope articulated by Ernst Block to suggest that in Jesus Christ, God reaches forward into God’s realized future of the Kingdom of God and brings it into the present. In this understanding of the Kingdom of God, we do not wait for the fulfilled reign of God in some far off future. In the Resurrection, the Kingdom of God is made manifest now in the revelation of God’s immediate and present reign. In an inspirational SXSW session, Jason Silva encouraged the audience to reach forward into the future and bring it into the present, suggesting that this action was the manifestation of human hope and progress. In fact, he said it was the act of becoming gods ourselves in the face of the death of religion. In the process, however, Silva neglected to quote Friedrich Nietzsche. Christian faith envisions God reaching into the future in Jesus Christ, pulling toward the present what God has always intended for God’s creatures: living within the immediate reign of God in God’s Kingdom in the midst of present experience. If this isn’t futurist, I’m not sure what is.
Christians are Infinitely Hopeful
Because God drives the present toward the future from the vantage point of God’s future, we can be absolutely hopeful. Even when faced with Peter Thiel’s analysis in one of the finest sessions of SXSW that the major economic forces around the world are facing the future with pessimism and have lost a sense for where things are going (indeterminate), Christians can remain optimistic. In fact, Christian faith can be determinately optimistic because of its confidence that the future is the Kingom of God. Determinate optimism, according to Thiel, is the opposing cultural force to pessimistic indeterminism. Christian faith take this stance in the midst of culture while being absolutely realistic. Given Theil’s analysis, Christian faith may just be the best vantage point toward the future!
These four themes open out to not only the possibility but the reality of a hopeful, Christian futurism. The difference between Christian futurism and other means for grasping forward into the mystery of the future is that the Kingdom of God is knowable, in part, through the character of God unveiled before us in Jesus. The fact that the future has been revealed does not mean it is completely known. But it is not as indeterminate as a generally open future that both claims and has no fundamental direction nor end. Lacking these, how can it be truly hopeful apart from a strong idealism and mere assertion of the term? With its balance of realism and hopeful embrace of the reality of God’s present reign in the character of Jesus Christ, Christians who utilize technologies imaginatively to serve others toward a future that looks a bit more like the Kingdom of God than the present have the potential to be the best futurists around at the moment.
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