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Theological Guidelines For The Future
By Charles C. West

"The technologists are asking the church and its thinkers to help them define the goals of their effort, and to co-determine guidelines for the application of their newly found power. They are asking for a definition of what is human so that moral suasion will reinforce technological reason in giving order to what is now a dangerously open field of experimentation. The revolutionaries are asking that their hope be subsidized at a moment when it threatens to go bankrupt. They want a confidence that, in fact, the way of transformation, of liberation in the foundations of our systems, is the direction of our future."

ON one fact nearly all the analyses of the trends of modern society agree: The structures of order, on which man has depended throughout the millennia to give his existence eternal meaning and direction, no longer control the reality in which we live. To put it in simple terms, God, as the symbol of the unchanging transcendent being, the measure and the goal of all that happens in this transient temporal realm, the ultimate reality in which all our partial realities participate, is no longer there. We have done with this hypothesis as an explanation of our world. His place is taken by man and man's activity. To be sure, the opinion on this point is not quite unanimous. There is in theological ethics a certain revival of the medieval realist tradition. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II does speak in one place of "the permanent binding force of universal natural law and its all-embracing principles" (Par. 79). Many

Charles C. West, formerly a Fraternal Worker in both China and Berlin, is Stephen Colwell Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N. J. He is the author of Outside the Camp (1958), Communism and the Theologians (1959), and numerous articles.

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cultures and races are seeking in their traditions for a mystical depth of ultimacy which will be the ground of their self-identity. Religious absolutes continue to appeal to threatened social groups and to rootless people. But out of these sources come very little analysis of modern technology and few programs of relevant action. They constitute warnings to Christian theology of a source of insight and a base of operations which are not available in speaking to a world of technological change.

We must start then with change as the basic fact. More than this, we must start with the change that man is making, with human power, with human hopes and their consequences. What is the pattern of this change? How does man understand and project himself into the future? How does the God, the very particular God whom we meet in the biblical history, interact with man there?

I

Let me begin with how man projects himself into the future. I would suggest, without any claim to be exhaustive, that there are at least three major patterns. The first is evolutionary, although its basic pattern predates the invention of the theory of biological evolution. Its proponents optimistically affirm without reservation, as a premise filled with hope, that man the planner, endowed with a technological reason that can remold his environment and even reshape his own nature, is the highest stage of development on this earth so far, and the key to its future. They may say with Karl Marx that man proves himself as a human being in his work upon the objective world until "he sees his own reflection in the world which he has constructed." Or, in the words of Julian Huxley,

"In the light of evolutionary biology man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance. He finds himself in the unexpected position of business manager for the cosmic process of evolution. He needs no longer regard himself as insignificant in relation to the cosmos. He is intensely significant. In his person he has acquired meaning, for he is constantly creating new meanings."¹

Man himself, then, is inherently universal. He is the deciding center of the universe into which physical nature is drawn and by which it is remolded. The acceleration of technological knowledge and control in the past generation only serves to underline this basic

¹ Evolution in Action, 1963, p. 139.

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faith which goes back to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, and to reinforce the dimension of unending self-development which Marx in his way and the social-Darwinists in theirs contributed to this faith in the nineteenth century.

Most of proponents of this form of humanism would recognize that this is a dangerous position for man to be in. Few would share the mystic confidence of Teilhard de Chardin that, in the entire process of evolution moving upward to the supra-human harmony of all things in personal love, the spirit of Christ is at work. For most of them, man stands exposed with his power, confronted with choices which may lead him to destruction should he make them irrationally. Planning man has the awful responsibility for choosing his values, for determining the form of human life he will have in the future, and for choosing one direction over another for his technology in the light of these basic decisions. Even human nature is not a given. But in spite of this danger there is a confidence in this point of view. It is expressed in the appeal to the human valuing reason, which all its proponents make: Man is to be the business manager of the cosmic process of evolution. The concept reminds one of the biblical steward and the question: Will he be found faithful when his lord returns? Underlying the brave assertions of human power and autonomy, and all the warnings against irresponsibility, is the faith that somehow the process itself is benevolent, even if man fails-that this process is expressed in human reason over against the baser desires and instincts of man that are less than truly human. This faith, though it decks itself out in the most radical assertions about change, is the modern form of traditional conservatism. It is a faith in the continuity of existing structures of planning and power, their modification and their perfection, as part of the union of man with the cosmos.

It is this faith which the second pattern of future projection does not share. "We live in a revolutionary situation," said Jürgen Moltmann speaking to the students at Turku two years ago. He defined revolution as "a transformation in the foundations of a system-whether of economics, of politics, of morality, or of religion." The starting point of this way of working toward the future is not man the planner, hoping by technological reason to control events so that the world does not fall apart, but man alienated, man critical of the dehumanizing tendencies built into the very structure of techno-

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logical society, seeking liberation by changing the basic relations of power. This revolutionary, as we know, need not be a theologian. He can believe as firmly as Julian Huxley that man must shoulder responsibility for his own destiny and make his own future. But for him the first act of human self-assertion is not planning but revolt. Scientific reason guiding action here takes the form of projecting human possibility as a standard by which to judge and condemn existing structures and trends, and of planning the strategy and tactics which are to transform the foundations of existing systems in order to realize that possibility. As Moltmann put it,

"In the student protest movements we have seen a revolt of man's political reason against its enslavement by merely technical thinking, of his moral reason against the exclusive use of 'value free' instrumental reason. The sciences are being recalled to their truly human possibilities and promises. They are to be enlisted for the realization of humanity. They can no longer be the slaves of a society which misses its genuinely human opportunities. Thus every science is questioned about its socio-political function."²

The revolutionary humanist and the technologists begin with the premise: History is a process of the self-emancipation of man. But the revolutionary humanist holds another premise which is basically different. Where the technologist speaks of development, he speaks of liberation. Where the technologist speaks of planning, he speaks of political confrontation. Where the technologist appeals to the common reason of mankind, he discerns the ideological bias in all reason, including the scientific and experimental. Where the technologist assumes that the development of controlling knowledge over man's nature and environment is one process and the ethical decisions as to how this knowledge shall be used is another, the revolutionary finds a dehumanizing bias in the basic process of this research, in the sources of its financing, in the determination of its direction, and in the conclusions it reaches. Nowhere is this suspicion sharper than in questions of population and its control. But it is reflected in different approaches to problems of pollution and ecological control as well, and in the utter failure of such scientists as worked on The Year 2000, and the best minds of the new left in this country or in the third world, to communicate with each other.

The revolutionary humanist also would recognize that man is in a

² Religion, Revolution and the Future, 1969, p. 131.

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dangerous and exposed condition. Few of these revolutionaries today would share the utter certainty of Karl Marx, or even Lenin, that the liberation of man is predetermined, even if the revolution has to be engineered. There is more open desperation on the left today than among liberals, or on the right-a fact which we need only read the newspaper to discern. This should not surprise us as much as it seems to. Those who start with the premise of alienation have only their hope to live by. It is natural that they thrash out against powers which in their evil dynamic threaten to extinguish even this. But underlying this active despair is the humanist premise still: that man is a self-liberating animal who achieves his humanity by struggling against the dehumanizing forces in nature and in society, and whose self-transformation in this process in his destiny.

Both of these forms of humanism have recently turned to theology in a fresh way. The technologists are asking the church and its thinkers to help them define the goals of their effort, and to co-determine guidelines for the application of their newly found power. They are asking for a definition of what is human so that moral suasion will reinforce technological reason in giving order to what is now a dangerously open field of experimentation. The revolutionaries are asking that their hope be subsidized at a moment when it threatens to go bankrupt. They want a confidence that, in fact, the way of transformation, of liberation in the foundation of our systems, is the direction of our future. Theologies have arisen which are trying seriously to operate within these differing premises. One might mention the work which Paul Ramsey has done on nuclear armaments and just-war theory, and more recently in medical ethics on the one side, and the theology of Richard Shaull and more recently of Rubem Alves on the other. But before we assume the debts and continue the enterprise of either of these alternatives, I would suggest we look carefully at a third.

Michael Harrington has labelled ours the "accidental century." In a different way Victor Ferkiss, in his thorough study of "technological man," makes the same point. There has been a revolution-a veritable explosion-in the sphere of technological knowledge and power, and in ways of life as a consequence. But this revolution has been diffuse, not coordinated. It has created disorder and resulted in decadence because it has thrown up no coordinating center of responsible decision-making. A technological elite establishment,

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engineering everything for the reinforcement of its own power and status, is a convenient myth for revolutionaries, but it does not exist.

In Ferkiss' picture, we have not a unified but an eclectic power structure, a multiplication of "estates" something like those of the Middle Ages, each defining its sphere of influence, and each jockeying for position in a world where none is secure. The problem of technological society, to use a biological image, is a process of decay accelerated by the release of immense amounts of energy connected with competing centers that neutralize and even break each other down. Capitalism, to return to Harrington's analysis, is the victim of its own accomplishments. The stimulation of private profit and the free centers of action which built up modern technology cannot control an inflationary economy which neglects the public sector. International competition that spurred the development of nuclear research cannot control its tendency to exceed any rational bounds in its capacity to destroy mankind. Nor are the poor exempt from this disintegration. Far from being unified by their increasing misery and dispossession, they are fragmented into competing groups with different and often competing goals. Their revolts are stirred by small immediate disturbances rather than being part of an imaginative restructuring of the whole of society. Their satisfactions are in participation on a lower level, in the fragmentary goods of a consumer society.

Harrington and Ferkiss do not share the illusion of Herbert Marcuse that the powers that be have woven a seamless web of engineered consent around themselves and their victims. But there is no positive or negative focus for this discontent. The enemy is no clear structure or group of persons. He is an evasive, amorphous mixture of influences that frustrate effective action for desirable goals. Man must be remade. He must become frankly technological, "in control of his own development within the context of a meaningful philosophy of the role of technology in human evolution. "³ But such a man does not exist, nor is he likely to arise simply because he is needed. "After God died," writes Harrington, "man, who was supposed to replace him, grew sick of himself. This resulted in a crisis of belief and disbelief which made the twentieth century spiritually empty."⁴ At the very time when man has succeeded

³ Victor C. Ferkiss, Technological Man: the Myth and the Reality, 1969, p. 246.
⁴ Michael Harrington, The Accidental Century, 1966, p. 145.

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beyond his wildest dreams in making nature serve his human purposes, he has lost confidence in his own ability to realize justice. He no longer believes in the immanent forces in his own nature which will move him to use his new freedom for good whether now or after the revolution.

This being so, where does one look now for meaning and hope? Both Ferkiss and Harrington call on scientists and ethicists (including, presumably, Christian ones) boldly to project utopias, plans which may be guides to action for man bringing all of nature into the human drama. These utopias will at least serve the purpose of breaking the habit of private thinking and action which has created the chaos we are now in. But both men beg the question, and here the theologian must take hold because it is a question of faith: Where, beyond the rational appeal of the utopia to the reader of such books as theirs, lies the power to realize the humanizing plan despite the forces of human nature itself? Harrington chides Dostoievsky for believing in a Christ whose love was too weak to survive in a world of complex organization and powers. But the realism of Dostoievsky poses a question to Harrington and his fellows, both technocratic and revolutionary: Where in the process of modern technological decadence does man confront a reality which speaks to him from outside his own management, his own projections of the future, a reality which is able to redirect him?

To the question thus posed, I would like to suggest several ideas which will not be answers but may indicate the direction in which answers may be sought, and may result in a collaboration between theologians and scientists in the business of realizing the future, or, perhaps more important, in a collaboration between faith and science in the breast of each technological man.

First, let me grasp one nettle firmly, at the risk of being highly controversial. Those analysts are right who blame or praise the Biblical message and its influence upon the history of Christendom for the secularization of the physical world and the drive which underlies modern science and technology to explore its workings and make them serve human purposes. The classical Greek view of an order or structure governed by immutable laws did provoke a lively interest in exploring the geometric and mathematical har-

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monies of the universe, but (the myth of Prometheus to the contrary) this exploration was contemplative. There remained an aura of sacred eternity about the laws of nature and the development of things which inhibited a technological attitude. The Bible, however, does not operate with such a concept of nature at all. There is no single word for the non-human environment of man in the Old Testament. There is not even a single equivalent for the Greek word soma which we translate "body" and distinguish in unbiblical fashion from "soul." In the New Testament the Greek word physis does occur, but absolutely no metaphysical conclusions can be drawn from its use. It indicates simply the character of a person or thing whatever it might be, never in any sense the combination of matter and form moving according to indwelling laws.

There is, of course, the concept "creation" in the Bible. But the very word indicates its relational character. It is that which God has made and which, to the eye of faith, shows forth his character and reflects his action. But it is the God of the covenant who is thus reflected. Despite the many efforts to build a whole concept of natural revelation on Romans 1: 20, one cannot read the character of God from the scientific study of physical nature. Creation is rather that combination of all persons and things which have resulted from the act of God, which suffer and decay together until set free by the power of Christ (Romans 8: 22), and which receive the good news of Christ's resurrection (Colossians 1: 20). The emphasis is on created people in their relation with God, in their history, into which the world of physical things is drawn.

Nature is therefore not an object to be understood in its own structure and according to its own laws. It is the setting for the history of God with his people, and it participates in that history as man subdues it and brings forth its fruits, as he was clearly commanded and empowered to do. Even the names of things in "nature" are the result of human operation on them, and therefore of their relation to man (Genesis 2). In the biblical history, man is responsible not to nature, but to God for the rest of God's creation. One may well speculate, in the light of what man seems tempted to do with this responsibility, whether it might not have been better, as Edward B. Fiske asked recently in the New York Times, for the followers of Yahweh to have been conquered by Baal worship in ancient Palestine. But they were not, and we their descendents cannot, even if we will, reverse the consequences.

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If we have the courage of our faith, therefore, we have reason to rejoice that modern natural science itself has come to realize in recent years that the knowledge it obtains about "nature" is functional, not descriptive, in its basic character. It defines the relation between the experimenter and the phenomenon being investigated, through the conditions of the experiment and its instruments. It is a form of power over phenomena qualified by this relation. One may move from this basic insight in two directions. On the one hand, one may say with the Dutch philosopher van Peursen that "laws have to be regarded as advice on how to proceed in matters of research and deduction. They present no images of reality but lines of policy." Or, with Michael Polanyi one may speak of the "heuristic vision," the act of creative imagination with which the scientist perceives order in the phenomena under his investigation, to which vision he then commits himself in an attitude analogous to faith. In either case, the relation of the scientist to his phenomena, his laws, or his vision, is part of a broader relation to his fellow man and to God. The revolutionaries are right in their suspicion of a value-free pursuit of scientific and technological knowledge. The basic decisions about the direction of scientific research in our times have been social decisions, governed by the desire to achieve some goals and not others. We have already given examples. But this situation poses the positive responsibility of the scientist and gives him his opportunity. He has, in a sense, a liturgical task: to suggest the quality of relations between man and man which a certain use of physical nature might make possible and which might reflect the covenant purposes of God.

Second, there is suggested in the above a view of knowledge itself which must be made explicit. There is, for a Christian, no such thing as purely objective descriptive information about physical reality or technological possibilities apart from some relation to them. The investigation of such fields as nuclear physics, biogenctics, or ecology are not one process, and the application of the results another. Knowledge itself is determined by the questions asked and by the problems to be solved or the goals to be achieved. The dependence of computer information on the programmed questions and data is only the most obvious example in the purely technological sphere. But the insight comes from the nature of revelation itself and the character of the God who made himself known in the biblical history. Revelation is never objective data. It is not

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primarily knowledge about something. It is the disclosing and the knowing which happens in a relationship, of giving and responding. In the reality of the other lies its objectivity, not in its independence of subjective commitment and engagement. To affirm knowledge in response to revelation involves a risk against which one cannot protect oneself by being tentative or hypothetical. One is changed as the relation corrects one's understanding of it and of the meaning of life in its light.

Our relation to technological knowledge today is analogous. We interact with our environment and it reveals itself to us. What we learn, however, is always the character of a relationship. What we affirm about it always involves a risk. We operate within basic commitments about the nature of reality which determine both what we explore and the information we find. My point here is that we should do this frankly and openly. It is our task, in trying to come to grips with our technological world, to be creatively ideological. It is our business as Christians to use what we have learned about the interaction of God with human nature and society to project possibilities for the control and use of technological knowledge and power which correspond both to the realities of divine judgment on the operation of human sin and to the divine promise which in Christ can transform the human situation. In short, it is our responsibility to translate the Christian hope into the language of technological analysis, and to infuse the latter with Christian hope. I will attempt to illustrate how this might be done.

III

We have seen how the problem of power has become an insoluble riddle for modern technology, and a dilemma that deepens with each new raising of the power stakes. In Romano Guardini's aphorism, "Man has nearly unlimited power over things, but he does not have power over his own power." One can attribute this, and some Christians have done so, to insufficient education in the values appropriate to technologically developed society and the means of realizing them. One can, on the other hand, maintain that the structure of a self-reinforcing status quo is maintained by those who now hold a near monopoly on technology, so that the way forward is to educate the masses in the means of self-liberation. There are Christians in this camp as well. I would suggest, however, that a biblical

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reflection on power brings up some other perspectives worth considering.

In the first place, no power in the biblical history is without a context in relations between God and man or between men. As we have seen, man is empowered by God to have dominion over other forms of life and his environment, but from the beginning the built-in limit of this power is the calling to bring forth the fruits of the earth and to fulfill its promise in relation with God. Man is called to be holy and to enter into communion with God, the Holy Spirit, who brings order out of chaos and gives form to all creation. But divine holiness, being an expression of God's power, becomes a danger to man who attempts to understand the meaning of his life and the character of his power from himself as center-and apart from the relation to God and his neighbor which defines the being into which he was called. God's holiness is not some inscrutable external force. It is the internal limit on human life which gives it form and direction. It is, therefore, the inexorable judgment on man's use of power in ways untrue to the promise and meaning of this life. Holiness is a way of saying "love" in power terms.

In the second place, in the New Testament there are exousiai, usually translated powers or authorities, which, it is recognized, have an inherent drive toward domination and autonomy. Paul warns his followers to put on the whole armor of God to fight against them. He lists them as among the forces that try to separate us from the love of Christ. But the same apostle also speaks of these powers as being made subject to Christ, even being created in him and being given a due place in all things by him, ordained by God in spite of themselves for a function in the economy of grace.

In the third place, the ultimate clarification of the meaning and character of power is found in the paradox of the servant who, in his suffering, will "bring forth justice to the nations and the coastlands shall wait for his law" (Isaiah). It is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ who embodied this power. The power of the relation of man with God is the power to make man new, to transform and reconcile him, and to subordinate all the superhuman exousiai which are rooted in his nature but have power over him, to their proper humanizing functions.

What does all this mean for technological power today? I believe

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it is not stretching a biblical point to say that the various forces of technology which push us around in modern society-the power of mass media, the various powers of massive private enterprise, the power of computer technology and automation, and the like-are modern exousiai. They are rooted in human desires and decisions, but they have become powers dominating and sometimes enslaving men, while they also tempt them. They are powers created for a good and proper function, but have made themselves autonomous over against the relations which should define that function. They are legion and they squabble with each other. They disrupt creation and society, but they are unable to organize it into one monolith for good or evil. Like that biblical personification of Roman exousia, Pontius Pilate, they sin more in failing to take their due responsibility than in overusing it. But this makes their power the more arbitrary. They seem to render vain all appeals to reason and any hope of changing the world for the better.

Where then does a Christian, given his faith, take hold? Not, I think, by holding up the mirror of a rational ideal which in fact cannot be realized. This is dualism and has been a temptation for Christians since the days of the Gnostic heresy. It constitutes a way of seeming to save the souls of the idealists while the world remains unchanged. In fact, such rational ideals are themselves relational. They are the ideologies of those who project them, and stand in sore need of correction by those whose social experience differs. Ideals of third world development projected by Western economists are an example. So are projections of benevolent control over society in the future by a technological elite.

Nor does the Christian start by hypostatizing a single unified enemy. This gives the Devil too much credit and cuts down the options in the power struggle to the point where despair always threatens to overcome faith. In fact the exousiai, despite themselves, are always being forced to do a few reasonably humane things in the service of God and other men because in fact Christ is lord over them. The struggle to subvert their self-understanding and the autonomous tendencies of their power is always a positive one. It may involve a politics of confrontation, but not the ultimate struggle of good with evil.

Christians are called to be witnesses in their use of power to the way in which power in fact is made humane and effective-namely,

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through a relationship of servanthood, and through a transformation of the excerciser of power in and through the relation he establishes by means of it. This may mean, for example, the projection of and commitment to a long range plan for third world development with a built-in plan for population control. It may mean, then, having this plan torn to pieces in the encounter with responsible leaders from the third world, partly from selfish private motives, partly because a plan, however rational and good-willed, is given a false tone by the relationship of dominance and dependence in which it is executed, and partly because even the most worthy plan by the greatest experts, if it is prepared in Europe or the United States, will contain built-in biases and special interests which only dialogue with the African, the Latin American, or the Asian can reveal. It may mean, finally, loss of control over the plan itself. It may mean being confronted with the choice of withdrawing from the whole thing or entering an ambiguous relation where the power of witness is our only hope. I am not trying to prejudge choices in this sketchy hypothesis. My point is that it is a Christian responsibility to leaven the lump of the responsible use of secular technological power by an analysis that does not presuppose control of the whole human process, and that, out of a lively sense of the reign of Christ, discerns signs of hope in ambiguous situations in such ways that it will give realistic guidance to secular action.

Finally, what is the form of a truly human life? "Is there," asks Michael Harrington, "a modern substitute for creative misery?" The question will occur to anyone who has lived through the depression and felt the surge of solidarity when the New Deal came to power, or who has experienced the intimate fellowship of common danger and deprivation in wartime. The ideals of socialism and of the labor movement were formed in movements which shared such a solidarity; nothing is more discouraging to those who have known this solidarity than to observe a class which, having achieved its relative goals, has become demoralized, contented, and individualistic. The rebellion of many young people today is rooted in a perception of this dilemma. But it is only rebellion, without a cause, and often without a discipline. In the light of what technology can do and is doing to meet material needs, what is the direction of humanization and what the style of human life? Have Chris-

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tians anything to say to the question on the basis of their model of 2000 years ago?

IV

Let me come straight to the point. There is, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, a determination of human nature that undercuts every attempt to conceive of humanity in general or collective terms. No man can be defined either as an individual or as an instance of a species, race, nation, or any other collectivity. It is his relations which give him life, form, and direction.

At the same time it is his relations that limit him. This is something that most technological planners, following the humanism shared by liberals and revolutionaries alike, tend to forget. The limit on man's existence does not lie at the limits of his capacities which can be extended indefinitely by technological, and, perhaps in the future, by biogenetical means. The limit lies at the center of his life where the other person confronts him at every turn and asks him to define who he is with relation to another. It is in this center that every person has to do with God. This means a continual redefinition of the self in this relation-a dying to self, if one likes, in order to find the form of creative interaction. Into this process, the control and remolding of the physical world may be drawn. There is no determinate limit to the amount of technology that can be useful here. But the focus of the whole society is basically distorted when the aim of development is taken to be the provision of an endless cafeteria of satisfactions for possible human wants and endless opportunities for self-expression. Culture grows, not out of abstract freedom, but out of the fabric of human relations where people offer themselves to each other and to God.

This suggests some implications for the form of Christian community in a technologically dominated society. It might, first, be a place where serious and important demands are made on people. It might take the place of our disappearing work-ethic, oriented around the family farm or shop, by becoming the place where the question of mutual responsibility is seriously asked and where practical opportunities are given to be of genuine service, even for those not technically trained to do certain jobs. It might try to recapture for the young, the old, the uneducated, and the poor, the sense of being needed.

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Second, the Christian community might be the place where a new ethos is formed. The placing of new values on forms of service and work now considered extraneous is one example. But ethosformation might also extend to the discernment of the human consequences of proposed technological changes in the area of highway or mass transportation development, for example, or the effect of zoning on community development, or of factory placement on community life. The possibilities are endless. But the danger is that human beings will be planned on the drawing boards of benevolent but self-interested exousiai unless there is in the field some counterforce with guiding principles, to be sure, but also with a sensitivity to the human interactions that never can quite be planned.

Third, the Christian community just might be the place which takes the conflicts within the society into itself and confronts them there with the power of God's reconciliation. Part of this dream is already fulfilled. Somewhere in churches in this country and around the world nearly every group and power is represented. But what about the ecumenical task? What of the serious confrontation of one another in Christ? If we can bend our efforts to helping this take place on every level and in every place, we will create the ferment out of which an ongoing theology for a society in technological change will grow.