Prophetic Responsibility

Learning Objectives  Describe the need for a “prophetic witness” regarding technology.  Describe message needing to be sent.  Explain who is responsible for sending that message.  Explain a strategy for sending that message.

The Need  James Houston: “I appeal to evangelical Christians to use the whole range of their professional skills to speak prophetically about our times. “We need deeper analyses of the pathology of scientific, technological, social and political evils in our contemporary world, in light of the eternal realities revealed in God's Word. “A new missionary enterprise is involved: to go virtually into every professional area of life, just as in the past we have emphasized the geographical penetration of our world with the gospel.”

Prophetic Responsibility  Mammoth Blasts: The Message  Jackpots: Your Message  Grannies: Forms of Responsibility  Donkers: Your Responsibility  Crushed Ice: The Strategy  Crackers: Your Strategy

The Message  Confront the idolatry of technology.  Sever the blind faith of technological progressivism  Avoid complacency; get involved  Confront materialism  Condemn technological evils Indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction Mind-controlling drugs for social management Eugenics Environmental degradation  A message of responsibility

Forms of responsibility  Relationship to Christ  Gifts, Talents, Calling  Membership in society “Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians”—John Stuart Mill  Occupation  Position, Role

A Strategy for Responsibility  Develop a network of concern.  Develop a broad perspective of decision-making: means and ends  Develop long-range ethical norms  Develop an appropriate life-style Avoid conformity (restrict television) Recycle Maintain a garden, avoid “convenience” foods  Live courageously

CONCLUSION Responsible technology must rest upon a servant-like commitment to love God above all and one's neighbor as oneself. It is as all of us--designers, research scientists, consumers, public policy makers, citizens, fabricators, corporate executives, journalists, scholars, and others-seeking to love as Christ loved us that we will be able to live in the line of creation and redemption. We will then broaden the standards by which our technologically relevant decisions are made to simultaneously include all the biblically based normative principles, and at the same time narrow the application of the economic, the technical, the scientific, and the political. In so doing we will responsibly fulfill the ancient cultural mandate. We will become builders who work with, not against, God's good creation to bring out and develop the riches he has placed there. As we do so we will often feel like exiles in a strange and threatening land. Yet we have God's promise that our efforts will not be in vain. Faithfulness will bear fruit. It will be a harvest of God's choosing and timing, but a valuable harvest nonetheless, one worth the struggle and the wait.