Reading the Technological Threads of the Biblical Story

About Reading the Technological Threads of the Biblical Story

Abstract

Scripture has very little content devoted directly to the topic of technology, but it has the everything to say about the Creator God’s covenantal relationship his creation. The written Word of God is first and foremost about God’s covenantal faithfulness to his creation as mediated through the incarnate Christ – a God who works his purposes in and through humanity. Since humans are created to engage in culture-making, this covenantal narrative will inevitably intersect our engineering experience at many times and in many ways. This big picture of scripture is arguably what unifies the community of Christ-followers across the diversity of Christian traditions . How this unifying picture of scripture subsequently illumines, guides, and directs our story today may arguably comprise our greatest disagreements in the Christian community. How exactly am I called to live in my particular time and place? More specifically, as a Christian technologist or engineer, how does scripture guide the implementation of a feedback control device or urban parking garage? If we were to exhaustively catalog all the references in scripture regarding technology and derive from each reference a specific principle from which to design or use technology as a Christ-follower , we would still miss much of what scripture hopes to have us hear as technological culture-makers . Too often we distill scripture down to an ethical or moral framework, and then attempt to apply this framework to our work as technologists. In doing so, we reduce scripture to a propositional guidebook and limit its power to shape us as narrative. Some stories in scripture which include reference to technology have very little to say propositionally regarding our work as engineers and the shape of contemporary technology, whereas other narratives are deeply concerned with technological issues, even when the specific references to technology are not in the foreground. Without claiming to be comprehensive in scope, the best way to illustrate how best to illumine our engineering and technology via scripture, is to practice retelling or reframing it across a variety of genres that appear across the canon of scripture. Using the canonical organization familiar to many evangelical readers of scripture, this paper will explore, how an experiential reading of scripture (i.e. beyond propositional reading) might reinforce not only our rational understanding of Christian engineering, but also our inspire our emotional and imaginative understanding as well.