Pentecost and Modern Science/Technology: Toward a Pneumatological Missiology
7
Pluralism, Secularism and Pentecost
Newbigin-ings for Missio Trinitatis in a New Century
Amos Yong
The bold thesis of this chapter is that a greater expansion of pneumatological themes will extend the legacy of Lesslie Newbigin, particularly in terms of the Christian missiological engagement with Western culture.1 More specifically, there are ontological, epistemological and ecclesiological aspects of pneumatology that are underdeveloped, even in Newbigin’s trinitarian theology, and these have the potential to further underwrite and empower his missional apologia vis-à-vis the progress of science in the modern world. The two parts that follow, first, unfold a more robust pneumatological missiology from out of select resources latent in Newbigin’s mission theology and, second, explore how such can revitalize Christian life and witness in a twenty-first-century world dominated by scientific achievements that see no prospect of diminishment.
The Spirit and Mission Theology: Expanding Newbigin’s Reach
This first section is primarily descriptive, albeit with a hermeneutical twist. Chiefly, I read Newbigin as a trinitarian missiologist and epistemologist, though from a Pentecostal perspective.2 I will then retrieve and foreground the pneumatological threads in his writings largely as they pertain to these themes but also show how they can and ought to be filled out in ways and for reasons consistent with his overall project.
Newbigin as trinitarian missiologist: A Pentecostal and pneumatological perspective. If a theologian like Karl Barth was almost single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the doctrine of the Trinity for Christian theology in the twentieth century, it is not too far-fetched to think that Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) played an essential role in retrieving trinitarian theology for theology of mission and mission theology in the wake of Barth’s attainments. Newbigin’s 1963 book, Trinitarian Faith and Today’s Mission,3 can now, in retrospect, be viewed as a manifesto that opened up conversations between ecumenists, theologians and missiologists across a chasm that had separated those working in the dogmatic disciplines from those laboring in what was considered the more practical fields of ministry and mission. The brilliance of Newbigin’s trinitarian theology of mission derives at least in part from how he understood the historicity of Christian faith in its pentecostal and especially incarnational events as foundational for Christian witness to the gospel in the modern world.4 Thus the proclamation of the gospel revolved around Jesus, “the one who announces the coming of the reign of God, the one who is acknowledged as the Son of God and is anointed by the Spirit of God.”5 As such, then, Christian mission can be understood no more or less than “as proclaiming the kingdom of the Father, as sharing the life of the Son, and as bearing the witness of the Spirit.”6 Such is manifest as Christian faith, love and hope in action: testifying to the gospel, embodying the gospel in love of neighbor, and living out the gospel in transformative and hopeful action that makes a difference in the world.7
Now while it is more often than not the case that trinitarian theologies are more accurately called binitarian (in terms of their neglect of pneumatology),8 this criticism fortunately applies less to Newbigin. To be sure, Newbigin’s christocentrism is palpable throughout much of his theological output so that one might be tempted to judge that his pneumatology is just as anemic as those found in other putatively trinitarian theological visions.9 Yet this is done only by overlooking the efforts he expended to probe specifically pneumatological matters at significant points over decades of work.10 For our purposes, we can summarize such pneumatological considerations along at least the following three lines.11 First, Newbigin’s pneumatology was part and parcel of his doctrine of God and of God’s redemptive activity. Thus Christians can only bear witness to the gospel in and through the power of the sovereign Holy Spirit. The mission of God for and through the church, including the church’s election, was inaugurated with the Pentecost event, so that the missio Dei is no more or no less than the missio Spiritus.12 Further, and second, that the church participates in the mission of the Spirit indicates that the church does so from a position of weakness (in effect), certainly reliant not on their own efforts but on the power of God. Such a posture of vulnerability hence also characterizes the transformative process that emerges out of where the church meets others—those in other faiths, cultural others, and so on—and interacts with them under the leading of the Spirit.13 Last but not least, then, the work of the Spirit is oriented toward the eschatological promise of the gospel. The Spirit carries the church forward in hope, enabling human witness and mission that heralds and anticipates the coming reign of God. As Newbigin writes,
It will be the work of the Holy Spirit to lead this little community [the church], limited as it now is within the narrow confines of a single time and place and culture, into “the truth as a whole” and specifically into an understanding of “the things that are to come”—the world history that is still to be enacted.14
I would like to think that the reason for the relative richness of Newbigin’s pneumatology within his overarching trinitarian missiology could be traced at least in part to his attentiveness early on to a burgeoning Pentecostal movement. Even at mid-century, Pentecostalism was registered as “the community of the Holy Spirit” and a “third stream of Christian tradition” (besides the Roman Catholic/Orthodox and Protestant traditions).15 Perhaps it was this Pentecostal insight that matured over time so that Newbigin would come to see the gift of the Spirit as the divine response to believers awaiting the full and final redemption of God. The eschatological gospel poured out through the Spirit at Pentecost neutralized, if not removed, finally what was begun with the election of Abraham—the curse of Babel—and made accessible to all the nations of the world the good news in their own languages.16 As he indicates elsewhere, “Pentecost is the biblical warrant for saying that God accepts languages.”17
While space constraints limit what else we might want to say about Newbigin’s pneumatology, it would still be accurate to identify his more as a christological rather than pneumatological trinitarianism. This is not a criticism of the resulting theology of mission but simply recognition that in the development of trinitarian theological discourse, the bulk of the work accomplished in the twentieth century lay across the christological rather than pneumatological register.18 Against this backdrop, Newbigin can be credited not only with carrying more than his fair share of the trinitarian load during the decades of his writing but even to have been slightly ahead of his contemporaries in recognizing that any fully trinitarian theology or missiology must be robustly pneumatological as well. However, having acknowledged Newbigin’s contributions along these lines, one should still hesitate to overstate the magnitude of his pneumatological theology. Developments in this arena since the last years of the preceding century have certainly pushed the discussion forward in ways only dimly anticipated even in the work of this insightfully constructive and ecumenical theologian.19
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the streams of pneumatological inquiry that has opened up to a torrent since the last days of Newbigin’s career belongs to the Pentecostal movement that he had long ago urged to watch, observe and learn from. To be sure, as late as a festschrift published not too many years before his death, Walter Hollenweger, a leading scholar of Pentecostalism, noted, in the spirit of Newbigin’s reflections on the movement, that Pentecostals still had not developed the needed theology of creator Spirit to empower Christian witness in a pluralistic world.20 Hollenweger himself was after, with the help of pneumatological considerations honed from close study of Pentecostal spirituality, what he called a more theologically responsible syncretism that could account for faithful contextualization or indigenization of the gospel in a world of many languages, cultures and religions.21 Although going beyond Newbigin’s own proposals in some significant respects, it is possible to read Hollenweger’s proposal within the emerging field of a world or global Christianity as consistent with that of Newbigin’s efforts to forge an authentic Christian witness in the pluralistic Western public square. It has been in the last two decades, then, that Pentecostal theologians have begun to appear and, inspired by Hollenweger among others, energetically advance the discussion in Pentecostal theology, pneumatology and pneumatological theology.22
There is no space within the scope of this chapter to do justice to these undertakings. I venture, however, cursory remarks on three lines of development that are relevant to the ontological, the epistemological and the teleological dimensions of Newbigin’s theology of mission. In my reading of Newbigin, he only rarely connects these themes specifically to pneumatology. How might a pentecostal and pneumatological perspective further secure the trinitarian credentials of Newbigin’s missiological theology?
The Spirit in a pluralist society: Newbigin-ings for missio Trinitatis in the present discussion? I begin with epistemology since arguably this was the starting point for much of Newbigin’s missional apologetic.23 In the throes of advances in science and technology since the Enlightenment, Newbigin discerned that twentieth-century humanity had bought into the modernist bifurcation between public facts (scientific and secular) and private values (religious or moral) and this had effectively removed religion from broader cultural and political influence. In response, Newbigin drew from the personalist and post-critical epistemology of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976),24 in particular from the latter’s argument that all knowing involves personal judgments and commitments, and that even scientists are situated amid and in relationship to, rather than apart from, their so-called objects of inquiry; hence, scientific advances accrue through intersubjective adjudication wherein researchers subject their interpretations of data to critical assessment and participate in, or indwell, the task of exploration within communities of inquiry.25 So if scientific knowing depends on traditions of cultural practices (called scientific research) in which fiduciary presuppositions and tacit assumptions are continuously negotiated and even contested by researchers, is such accumulated knowledge qualitatively different from religious knowledge?
Newbigin urged that Christian doctrine and theology also emerges as those in the Christian community live into, even indwell, the claims of the gospel bequeathed by the apostolic followers of Jesus and try the veracity of such claims in the places and times of succeeding generations.26 The difference is that whereas much of scientific work is focused in circumscribed areas, arenas or locales of investigation, the testing of the gospel unfolds across the full scope of ecclesial and human history, surely concretely manifest in the incarnational and pentecostal events of the first century but with subsequent, ongoing and anticipated implications and applications by and for the church in relating missionally to the world.27 For this reason, Newbigin urged consideration of Christian congregations as “hermeneutic of the gospel”28 in the sense that the meaning and significance of the euangelion as good news could only be accessed by the world insofar as particular communities of faith embodied its relevance and coherence. Even Christian believers come to know the gospel as public truth not only or even at all because they have studied its teachings objectively but inasmuch as they indwell its message as members of the body of Christ (and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, I would add).
Although Newbigin did observe the scriptural traditions linking human knowing to the work of the Spirit, he brought pneumatological themes to bear not on his appropriation of Polanyian epistemological insights but on how the church comes to know the gospel as the people of God in history.29 Pentecostal thinkers more recently, however, have begun to ask questions about epistemology from a specifically pneumatological perspective.30 It is not just that the Spirit leads the church into all truth, but that the Spirit who is poured out on all flesh according to the Pentecost narrative (Acts 2:17) mediates the truth through the materiality, historicity and sociality of human constitutedness. In that case, knowledge of God is surely given through Scripture as well as tradition, reason and experience, as Newbigin argued, but this mediation is actually accomplished by the Spirit.31 Such pneumatological knowing also emerges from indwelling, by the Spirit, of the church and also history itself. In that respect, human knowers are not only culturally conditioned but also culturally informed, and hence they are uniquely situated to negotiate the claims of the gospel with that of culture as they inhabit both ecclesial and cultural spaces, oftentimes simultaneously. In this way, the Day of Pentecost narrative points to both God’s acceptance of the multiplicity of human languages, as Newbigin averred, and to the redemptive power of the gospel vis-à-vis the many cultures that are linguistically intertwined. Put another way, if the many tongues of Pentecost are indissoluble from the many cultures and even religious traditions of the world, then the redemption of many languages signaled at the Pentecost event foreshadows also, however dimly, God’s salvation-historical project of salvaging and deploying cultural and even religious plurality for divine purposes.32 We will return to expand on the ontological implications of such momentarily.
Intrinsic to such a pentecostal epistemology, however, is the teleological dimension of pneumatology and pneumatological theology. As already mentioned, Newbigin clearly diagnosed the modern predicament as involving, among other bifurcations, the divorce of purpose and design from analysis and explanation. He thus argued tirelessly that the salvific power of the gospel lay in its capacity to orient human life toward that which was supremely meaningful and hence that only such a teleological focus related to divinely elected purposes could provide the overarching vantage point for understanding Christian faith and motivate embodying and living out its commitments. In that respect, Christianity could be finally assessed only teleologically, and its publicness and truthfulness could only be determined in the eschatological long run.
This establishes Christian life in an eschatological framework, related to the ultimate purposes of the divine reign instated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and initially made available to those in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Newbigin clearly recognized that the Spirit “is the presence in foretaste of the kingdom.”33 However, he did not quite, from this perspective, connect the teleological character of Christian knowing and doing with this pneumatological eschatology (or eschatological pneumatology, so it could be argued). So even if the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost heralded the coming reign of God and empowers Christian mission toward that end,34 Newbigin did not close the loop between such a pneumatologically configured eschatology and the teleological rationality that he otherwise sought to develop in his epistemological considerations.
In this respect the proposal of Thomas Foust to consider Newbigin’s as an eschatological epistemology can be understood pneumatologically.35 Such a pneumatological reframing achieves two important gains. First, Newbigin’s teleological rationality is situated more securely in the divine purposes unfolded in the eschatological events of incarnation and Pentecost; in this case, the purposes related to the how, why and what of knowing is not just philosophically developed but also theologically articulated in relationship to the trinitarian mission of God. Second, such a teleological-eschatological-pneumatological connection ensures a theological, even trinitarian, grounding for epistemological considerations against the allegedly but overreaching neutral standpoint sought for by the Enlightenment quests for knowledge and certainty. The full scope of such a pneumatological approach to epistemological concerns will need to be fleshed out elsewhere, but the point to be made is that the intercommunicative intersubjectivity opened up by the Pentecost event invites a reconsideration of epistemic indwelling made possible by the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh.
Pentecostal theologians have charted both of these trajectories. My own work features the discernment of what I have called a “pneumatological imagination” that reconsiders the challenges and opportunities for the contemporary epistemological discussion in terms of the pluralistic, intersubjective and eschatological communicative event that is the Day of Pentecost narrative.36 Within this context, the eschatological work of the Spirit bequeaths a fundamentally teleological dynamic that opens up the triune revelation to practical habituation and performative confirmation as members of the body of Christ and the fellowship of the Spirit live into the promises of the gospel and certify its effectiveness, relevance and truth. Knowing in the Spirit is thereby fundamentally eschatological and teleological as the Spirit’s gift empowers thinking, feeling and acting according to the purposes of the age that has already arrived in part, but is also clearly not yet.37
If epistemology follows ontology, as is arguably the case,38 then any pneumato-eschatological epistemology will presume ontological commitments of one sort or other. Ontologically speaking, then, I want to connect more tightly the link between Newbigin’s understanding of plurality and contemporary pneumatological discourse. It is clear that he thought deeply and at length about plurality, first during his almost thirty years in India and then in the last few decades of his life back in Britain, where he observed through ever increasing patterns of migration the transformation of the nation into a multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious society. He distinguished the historical and cultural fact of plurality from the ideology of pluralism that celebrated such to the point of insisting that differences are due to perceptions and are not matters of truth or falsehood, and dedicated much of his writing during the last quarter of the twentieth century to exploring how to proclaim the gospel in this context.
Yet for all of his renown as apologist against the ideology of pluralism, religious and otherwise, it needs to be highlighted that Newbigin was convinced that Christians could not only learn from but also be transformed in their encounters with others in the pluralistic public square. Without denying his admonishment that any engagement with religious otherness ought to proceed from a firm christocentrism, Newbigin nevertheless insisted that:
The point is not to diminish the import of Christian conviction in approaching the interfaith encounter, but to highlight that such commitments do not immunize Christ-followers from being transformed in their interactions with religious others.
As Newbigin, however, I am concerned to ground the possibility of such mutual transformation theologically. My more pneumatological approach thus complements his christological angle, with the intention of furbishing a more vigorous trinitarian theology for missional engagement with the pluralistic public square. To be sure, Newbigin himself understood the alethic character of trinitarian faith in a pluralistic world,43 but there is some question about the coherence of such trinitarianism, especially in terms of how to understand the relationship between the Spirit and the Son.44 My suggestion is to emphasize how trinitarian faith has implications for thinking about creational plurality, in which case, the renewal that is Pentecost redeems, restores and reorients such creational diversity toward divine purposes.
If in fact Newbigin devoted much of his writing career to developing a viable Christian response to the pluralism endemic to Western culture in the second half of the twentieth century, Pentecostal theology has come of age and arguably matured precisely from grappling with pluralism not only outside of its ranks but as inherent to Pentecostal spirituality, ecclesiality and reality as a whole. For this task, Pentecostal theologians have thought not only missionally about pneumatology but also ontologically about how to understand the Spirit in relationship to the human experience of plurality. The Day of Pentecost narrative has served, in this capacity, to fuel ontological, theological and trinitarian reflection about diversity and manyness, albeit with missional implications, to be sure.45
Pentecost and Modern Science/Technology: Toward a Pneumatological Missiology
What would it be like, then, to develop Newbigin’s thinking about mission in a pluralistic, scientistic and modernistic world especially in the light of the pentecostal and pneumatological gestures already present in his work? In the rest of this chapter, I want to reconsider Newbigin’s trinitarian theology of mission within the modern scientific and technological context, but do so in a way that redefines pluralism and secularism according to the ontological, epistemological and teleological pneumatology developed above. In particular, a pneumatological approach to the theology and science conversation can situate the many disciplines within a larger narrative of eschatological (rather than modernistic) progress, and a pentecostal understanding of technology might also suggest alternative possibilities for indwelling, and thereby redeeming, the promise of modernity. This dual redirection, I suggest, provides Newbigin-ings for Christian belief and practice for the twenty-first century that are consistent with the missional thrusts promoted by our protagonist.
Modern science: toward a pentecostal-eschatological understanding. Much of the modern period has seen what A. D. White long ago called a “warfare” between science and theology, as one-sided as this account is.46 To the degree that the chemical and physical sciences claimed to discover natural laws that constrained, produced and even dictated what happened, even within the human realm, thus undermining, at least on the surface, the perceived supernaturalism of the biblical accounts; to the degree that the geological and paleontological sciences suggested the earth was a lot older than what the biblical genealogies added up to; to the degree that the biological sciences indicated that human creatures had evolved from earlier non-human life forms rather than specially created; to the degree that the astronomical and cosmological sciences eviscerated the heavens from angels, demons and other spiritual beings, and predicted a final universal and cosmic conflagration or heat death, and so on—to that same degree many believed that science and religion were incompatible. Hence naturalists and materialists felt that modern science had eliminated the need for religious faith in a transcendent reality even as biblicists rejected science as godless and believed its claims would be eventually proven untrue, even according to its own methods. The latter also repudiated attempts to blend theistic faith with the modern scientific consensus since such was considered more often than not to have accommodated too much to science rather than remained faithful to the perceived supernaturalism of the Bible.
Part of the problem was that scientific advances proceeded at least in part because of modern science’s capacity to identify material and efficient causes that enabled a range of technological advances. While we will return to pick up on this discussion in a moment, the point is that modern science’s ability to identify causation gradually removed the need for God or other supernatural causes prevalent in the premodern mind. Yet the gains made in this direction were at the expense of understanding or even allowing for final causes. Newbigin himself emphasized that the bifurcation of teleology from scientific inquiry contributed to the overall sense of naturalistic and materialistic purposelessness.47
Still, unlike some biblicists, Newbigin’s apologetic response was not dismissive of science. Instead, as already indicated, he drew from Polanyi’s personalistic and participatory epistemology to equalize the playing field, so to speak, between science and Christian faith. Science itself proceeded from assumptions that the world was both rational and contingent, and these were indispensable to scientific inquiry. If that were the case, then “the whole work of modern science rests on faith-commitments which cannot themselves be demonstrated by the methods of science.”48 Further, from a close analysis of the scientific method of observation, hypothesis-formation and experimentation, the roles of imagination, intuition, insight, inference, abduction, and trial and error all suggest that there “is no knowing without believing, and believing is the way to knowing,” and that science, “like every human activity, is a socially embodied exercise.”49 Hence for Newbigin, the alleged distinction between scientific knowledge and religious faith is just that: purported and asserted rather than based in fact or reality. Epistemologically, as we have already noted above, religious knowledge and faith are structurally similar to scientific knowledge and its presuppositions.
Newbigin’s further response as a missionary to Western culture, rightly in my estimation, was to emphasize how Christian faith provided the broader cosmic telos that complemented the knowledge of the present material and physical world. Christian beliefs and practices thus gave ultimate meaning and significance to human lives beyond what science, with its limited foci, could provide. While correct insofar as this goes, such a response of “putting science in its place”50 still appears a bit too defensive and may not go quite far enough in reorienting and even redeeming science itself toward a teleological vista. There are at least two aspects to this reorientation that I believe are implicit in Newbigin’s views regarding science, but which could benefit from being more clearly registered. First, it has repeatedly been shown that scientific inquiry cannot altogether bracket final causality in its work.51 Try as they might, for instance, biologists cannot separate questions about design and purpose from evolutionary science. The issue here is how to factor such aspects into research on biological evolution without undermining the path of inquiry. Relatedly, and second, research itself is driven by purpose, as Polanyi accentuated. Even scientists who work at their craft for no more than research’s sake still are motivated to make a contribution and to advance the existing pool of knowledge. Hence, there is a teleological dimension to the scientific vocation and if so, then such may connect at a deeper level to Christian commitments.
I suggest that the scientific enterprise itself can be boosted with such teleological reorientation. If the origins of modern science derived from Christian convictions—for instance about the rationality and contingency of the created order—then is it too much to expect that Christian faith might, even in the present climate, renew and revitalize the scientific undertaking by recapturing a more overarching telos? Having learned from Polanyi, Newbigin urges that believers “have to indwell the [biblical] story, as we indwell the language we use and the culture of which we are a part.”52 I suggest that the present Christian contribution to science may emerge from out of believers indwelling not only the scriptural narrative but also their own scientific cultural praxis. Is it not the case that the tacit and personal knowledge shaped by such mutual indwelling allows for skillful and seamless habitation and navigation in both domains? This is not to inappropriately synthesize or syncretize the research lab and the congregation. It is to suggest that only those who are deeply and appropriately formed by the beliefs and practices of both locales are able to translate, discursively and practically, the convictions from one arena to the other, and able to simultaneously discern how best to proceed on the Christian path with scientific knowledge and how best to push forward in the scientific sphere with Christian vision.
I further suggest that such discernment emerges most naturally from out of a Christian self-understanding that includes an explicit delineation of what might be understood as the redemptive possibilities for modern science. Here I draw also from the Day of Pentecost narrative that invites consideration of how the preservation of the many languages provides a window into the Spirit’s redeeming the cultural domain. If languages are essentially and profoundly related to cultures, then the miracle of Pentecost involves not only the cross-linguistic communicative comprehensibility but also the cross-cultural and intercultural constitution of the new people of God. This is not to now baptize every aspect of any and all cultures even as it does not automatically sanctify every element of any and all human languages. It is only to point to the potency of the Spirit’s pentecostal outpouring: that in principle, no cultural-linguistic group is beyond the pale of the gospel’s renewing and redeeming work, and that part of the task of Christian witness is translation of the euangelion into any and all other cultural-linguistic idioms that Christ-followers might come into contact with.53
When considering the modern scientific enterprise, however, I suggest a further extension of this pentecostal principle. Scientific disciplines can be considered, analogously, to be distinctive cultural-linguistic traditions. There is not only a plurality of sciences—from the physical to the bio-environmental, from the natural to the human, from the material to the technological—but expertise in each of these requires an intentional, intensive and prolonged form of socialization wherein one goes through a process of indwelling a certain scope of theoretical assumptions, of gaining facility with a certain modality of experimental practices, and of inhabiting or inculturating over years a certain set of institutional, academic and organizational arrangements.54 Conversations across disciplines are not easily achieved, and sometimes there is outright disagreement separating one group of researchers from others. The point is this: there are many scientific disciplines, each of which opens up windows into the nature of the world and, in their own way, are capable of “speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11), understood from the standpoint of faith. There is no reason why the power of the pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh to renew, retrieve, reappropriate and, ultimately, redeem the many cultural-linguistic traditions of the world ought not also to be applicable to the range of sciences and their discursive cultural practices.55
This does not mean that any and all aspects of the many scientific disciplines are amenable to such renewal and even redemption. It only provides a theological and eschatological horizon for a Christian and pentecostal understanding of the sciences and invites believers to not have to shed their faith commitments in their scientific undertakings. Such a pneumatological theology of the sciences, then, opens up to embrace scientific multi-disciplinarity (the fact of disciplinary plurality), inter-disciplinarity (wherein on many questions, multiple disciplinary perspectives are required for more adequate comprehension) and even trans-disciplinarity (which highlights the dynamic character of scientific development that is able to appreciate the distinctive contributions of various disciplines while also recognizing their fluid and expansive character morphing as the state of knowledge advances).56 In this framework, the scientific task can be understood as one avenue for the outworking of the Christian scholarly vocation, one that receives scientific inquiry as a divine gift and that anticipates that the work of science will continue to illuminate the nature of creation in anticipation of the coming reign of God.
If Newbigin’s strategy for Christian mission in a pluralistic and secular Western culture involved telling a story that is larger and more encompassing than that told by the modern world,57 my point is to resituate modern science within the gospel account so that Christ-followers can inhabit that scientific space as part of, rather than separate from, their spiritual vocation. If the many tongues of Pentecost include the many scientific disciplines, then there is theological, not just pragmatic, rationale for Christians to reconsider their teleological character and to commit to working in the sciences as part of their missional vocation. In this case, then, there are Newbigin-ings for a Christian apologetics in relation to modern culture that, rather than merely evening out the playing field between the plurality of scientific disciplines and the Christian faith, actually resituate scientific pluralism amid the eschatological hope of the Day of Pentecost’s redemptive trajectory.
Modern technology: toward a pneumato-missiological engagement. Yet modern science includes not just its disciplinary plurality but also its capacity to discipline, if not deform, a Christian way of life. This happens with the technologies that modern science has produced.58 The pervasiveness of technology in shaping Christian sociality is more subversive than the disciplinary experimentation that affects only those initiated into the scientific quest since the former envelops and engulfs all of us.59 In other words, modern technology is even more potent in informing, as well as undermining, Christian commitments since it works on us subtly in the background of our daily lives rather than more overtly (as in a scientific laboratory). Herein lies a disguised pluralism, one that habituates our indwelling into at best a nominal theism and at worst a practical atheism,60 and hence has subversive power against which any postsecular apologetic may be otherwise impotent. Although ours is a postmodern, post-Enlightenment, postsecular age in many respects, it would be a mistake to think that the advances of science and technology are going to disappear, and that secularity itself will thereby gradually wither away. If instead the secular will be perpetuated at least technologically, then the Christian mission to Western culture will also need to be recalibrated in late-modern terms, precisely part of the goal of this essay.61
The way forward is to render more visible—naming and identifying—the invisible pluralism of modern technology.62 Isn’t it the case that the undermining of Christian identity in the modern world derives precisely from technology’s promise to produce what in premodern times had been the preserve of God? To the degree that bio-agricultural technologies, for instance, have harnessed and produced food to alleviate hunger around the world (the hindrances to distribution of political economies notwithstanding), thereby lifting the urgency of prayer for rain or for holding back the floods that could destroy the harvest; to the degree that biomedical technologies have made possible the repair and even enhancement of human bodily impairment, dysfunction and frailty, thereby lessening the need for miraculous curing or healing; to the degree that information and engineering technologies have produced a middle class defined by entertainment, leisure and consumption, thereby eliminating the hope of divine intervention for a flourishing quality of life, and so on—to that same degree modern technology has shifted the human gaze from the divine to the immanent sphere. It is not even that there is a need to call on God to defend ourselves against technology, but that a technologically constructed and sustained life minimizes the need to call on God at all. In fact, its pervasiveness has rendered all of us, Christians and otherwise, complicit in enhancing such a way of life, so that there is “a common and tacit agreement to shape the world and conduct one’s life according to the technological pattern.”63 Technology is thus not the enemy out there (as scientists and their laboratories can be imagined to be) but is now within us, having redefined our humanity, creatureliness and even finitude.64 More troublingly, however, it is not just that most of us now think that the many problems human beings confront can be technologically overcome, but that our technological expertise has transformed us into masters of our own fate, bringing with this also our capacity for ultimate self-destruction.65
Needless to say, any attempt to develop a naysaying approach that rejects technological advances will be ineffective, not to mention hypocritical, given its reliance on information technologies for dissemination of such an apologetic. A more measured stance will attempt to retain the interpersonal aspects of human interaction in order to ameliorate the universal stranglehold of a technologically ordered way of life. Yet such an approach, while valuable in many important respects, remains ultimately reactionary to modern science and technology. And even if some ground were gained in the meanwhile, in the long run, human life and identity will only be increasingly intertwined with technology (even as we have from our earliest history already been tool-makers and technology-developers).
My proposal, then, is to reorient our posture toward technology so that we are not merely reacting to its potential threats, but consciously engaged with what we might call its Christianization and even redemption.66 By this, I am referring not to any neo-colonialist takeover of our technological industries, but to a more intentional attempt to reorient and redeem the opportunities and challenges inherent in technology. There are at least three trajectories for such a task: one generic, the second along a more specifically Newbiginian route and, finally, in pneumatological mode toward a trinitarian missiology for contemporary pluralistic and secularistic culture.
More generally, any Christian approach to technology will need to have practical benefits. By this, I mean that a Christian theology of technology in the end empowers more faithful Christian discipleship through the use of technology. Brent Waters, a Christian ethicist, puts it this way: that one noble objective is “to develop and use technologies that enable a faithful exercising of limited dominion,”67 which, in recognition of our creatureliness, respects the finitude of our technological undertakings. Given the dizzying breadth of technological developments, Christians will need to nurture interdisciplinary expertise so as to be able to bring theological and ethical commitments to bear on the analysis, assessment and discernment of technological advances. If Newbigin decried a one-size-fits-all approach to the plurality of cultures,68 so also ought we to be wary about any one mode of engaging with the diversity of human technologies. How to live as technological pluralists will remain a central question that will require input from as many perspectives as there are technological disciplines and sciences.
Yet, second, the goal is not only to develop a practical strategy for controlling technology before it controls us, as essential as such may be. Rather, such a utilitarian approach buys into the instrumentalist premises that spur technological inquiry and development. A more holistic Christian response will spring off Newbigin-ings afforded by his epistemology of indwelling. Here, as in the preceding section, Christians are urged toward what might be considered a mutual inhabitation wherein Christian faith informs interaction with our culture of technology on the one hand, and responsible participation in our technological world shapes Christian practice on the other hand. The goal here is a prioritization or privileging of Christian commitments in engagement with technology, even while acknowledging that technological knowledge can also enhance and empower a more authentic Christian faith and robust Christian witness.
Newbigin’s proposal of the “congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel”69 invites further consideration of how such a redemption or Christianization of technology might unfold. Newbigin’s focus in this matter was on providing the communal, traditioned and interpersonal framework for reading, interpreting and understanding the Scriptures on the one hand, and for communicating the gospel to a watching world on the other hand. This is because any truth claims are sustained and convincing not on their own as logical arguments but as informed ways of life that coherently address contemporary experiences, questions and anxieties.70 Thus the practices of Christian congregations—their praise/thanksgiving, truth-seeking/testifying, ministry of edification to those within the congregation, and priestly and compassionate mediation to outsiders—both represent and embody God’s “new social order” and provide hope to the world.71 I suggest that such practices, already technologically mediated, need to be technologically alert, savvy, so to speak. Without explicit attention to the technological dimensions of our worship, prayer, praise, ministry and mission, we will be blind to how each of these activities is already technologically framed anyway. Thoughtful alertness to the underlying technological mediation of such practices allows both more appropriate modes of indwelling the technology on the one hand and redirection of such technology for missional purposes on the other hand.72
This leads, third, to what might be considered a pneumatological missiology of technology. Such a theological vision is pneumatological in extending the pentecostal theology of science proposed above in a performative direction so as to be alert to and pointedly engaged with the full scope and range of technological enterprises that constitute human life. The many tongues of Pentecost not only provide a pluralistic theology and ontology for understanding, interacting with and redeeming the many scientific disciplines, but also empower many practices amidst the technological pluralism of the present age.73 Such a pentecostal and pneumatological missiology understands the many forms of technology as divine gifts that can be deployed for good or ill, and thereby recognizes the need to nurture proper habits of living technologically and faithfully so as to facilitate more accurate discernment about the promise and challenges of technological advance in light of the promise of the coming reign of God. If what we need “is a Spirit-led understanding of the trinitarian life of God that shows us how to be related to the lives of other people,”74 then nothing less ought to be expected for us to engage with others about what is at stake in a technologically mediated, if not defined, human future so that such is oriented toward the values of the divine reign. This means that the gospel narrative as scripted in the biblical witness provides the template for how the medium shapes the message and does so by reordering human life in accordance with the message of Jesus.75 The objective is to live into the promise of technology insofar as it enables more Spirit-imbued life and witness in a pluralistic and secular world, while resisting its insidious power to corrupt Christian belief and practice in the present time.
The call for a teleological and performative mode of engagement with science and technology nevertheless depends on divine initiative rather than on human responsibility. Fortunately, the outpouring of the Spirit in “the last days” (Acts 2:17) inaugurates the eschatological purposes of God and enables our participation in such a venture. In this way the gift of the Spirit is central to the trinitarian missio Dei for a pluralistic and secularistic late-modern third millennium.76