Pilgrims ‘Underneath the Satellite Sky’: Weaning ourselves from Technological Idolatry
Humanity, whatever that now means, remains a restless bunch. Manifestations of its restlessness are everywhere. Not so long ago, ‘moderns’ believed that secular progress was the solution to our restlessness. Through our own capacities and technological developments, modernists ‘believed ourselves capable of radically transforming man and society’.* And they were not wrong about this. Human self-understanding and social relationships were radically altered, and the resulting changes for the church and society have been staggering.
For Christians, these changes are a mixed bag. Like every epoch of the ‘earthly city’, it is marked by ‘splendid vices’ and not-so-splendid ones.‘ We have been to the moon’, sang Mark Heard, ‘but there is trouble at home’.* Our technological mastery over nature (and even over ourselves) is simply astonishing. But it has been carried out largely by our fundamental vice- libido dominandi, our lust to dominate. And we do this as our lusts dominate us.
Take the race to land on the moon. Nations at the forefront of that race may have told themselves that landing on the moon was a ‘huge step forward for mankind’. But ‘Sputnik in free flight’* revealed a deeper conflict. The political, military, technological, and scientific developments ushered in after that ‘advance for mankind’ were bound up with which nation would be at the the technological superpower of the world. Modern progress and advance did nothing to ‘tame’ or ‘limit’ our fundamental vice (or vices), but largely made it possible to exponentially widen its exercise, abuse, and our enslavement to it.
Take, for example, our fundamental human nature. Redefinitions of what it means to be human and our purpose in this world, anchored in a rejection of the Christian God and Hiscreated and moral order, have left us ‘naked and afraid’, where many are anxious even in their own skin. The modern daydream of ridding the world of what many believed to be its fundamental problem - anxiety and restlessness, caused by enslavement to an oppressive natural and social order, based on the ‘superstition’ of religion - has not saved us, nor can it.
In fact, it has only increased anxiety, restlessness, and despair, with an increased hopelessness in a world void of inherent meaning and purpose. We late moderns have no substantive reference points which are binding in terms of what it means to be human or to live as humans.. Lacking such reference points has led contemporary humanity into a state of unparalleled confusion and anxiety about our identity and purpose as humans in the world. Some salvation! Some utopia!
‘Why can’t I sleep in peace tonight’, sang Mark Heard, ‘underneath the Satellite sky?’* The modern daydream has led to what Reinhard Hütter has called ‘the postmodern nightmare’.*
The technological progress which we so idolize in our our age makes our delusion seem possible, but also results in humanity’s undoing and harm The hubristic goal of ridding humanity from all constraints on its freedom, whether it be God or religion, family or neighbor, social roles or expectations, nature or bodily limits, language and meaning, has so radically transformed our relations and self-understanding that we no longer know what it means to be human other than the mere exercise of un-restrained choice and self-determination. With no boundaries or measure, humanity in many ways becomes ‘nothing’ but its own making.
And without any measure as to what it is to be and how it is to act as human, the so-called cure for human anxiety and restlessness has become worse than the disease. The burden of having to construct a self where nothing at all encapsulates what it is to be human other than what one thinks or feels or desires is not a cure for restlessness but its very root. It is the self curved in on itself. And this, for Christians, is the very definition of sin and consequence of idolatry.
Sadly, Christian churches and individuals have uncritically embraced much of the modern and postmodern assumptions and talking points about reality with little challenge. The reasons for this are complex and multilayered. To note a few: first, we live in a theologically illiterate age in the church. Because of this, what Bible and theology we do understand is often uncritically read through the Modern or Late-Modern lenses rather than genuinely Christian ones. We hold to orthodox Christian belief, but it is interpreted and applied via unquestioned assumptions often fundamentally at odds with the faith. Second, our engagement with the wider culture has erroneously embraced that contemporary culture as a sort of inevitable secular fate we must forcibly bend the Gospel to fit into. But as Anglican divine E. L. Mascall noted years ago,
A theology which is more concerned to be contemporary than to be true will have neither the right nor the power to influence the contemporary world; all that it can do is to win a grudging and contemptuous toleration by the world, on the condition that, whatever else it does, it does not challenge the world’s assumptions about itself.*
How then do we Christians embody, witness to, and promote a vastly richer alternative to the heresies of modernity and apostasies of postmodernity? How do we cultivate enough discernment to we see our own unchecked embrace of cultural beliefs, assumptions, appetites fundamentally at odds with being a pilgrim people of the Heavenly City within the fallen and rebellious Earthly City? I will be addressing these questions with depth in essays to follow. This essay was meant to introduce us to the context and challenge before us. And it was meant to remind us that our concern for the Gospel MUST not be more concerned to be contemporary than be true. Only then will we be offering a world searching everywhere in the earthly city for something to assuage its fundamental restlessness with a true peace found only by the divine light of the Heavenly City.
*Footnotes in order
1 - Mark Heard, Satellite Sky. Fingerprint Records, 1992.
2 - Cantel Delsol. Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. Trans. Robin Dick. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003. Pg. xxiii.
3 - Mark Heard, Satellite Sky.
4 - lbid.,.
5 - Ibid.,.
6 - Reinhard Hütter, Bound to Be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethics, and Ecumenism. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004. Pg. 116.
7 - E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe. Morehouse-Barlow, 1965. Pg. 13.