1
Lawrence
Terlizzese
Evangelical
Theological
Society
Dallas
Theological
Seminary
2001
Annual
Meeting
Evangelicals and Technology: Establishing Boundaries
Technological development is the most well embraced social reality and the
greatest intellectually and theologically neglected subject in Evangelicalism today.
Evangelicals need to reevaluate their understanding toward modern technology, seek to
renew the Evangelical mind by creating a critical dialogue with technical modernity, and
discover technology's limits as opposed to the easy acceptance of technological progress.
Evangelicals embrace technology as self-evident truth, except for extremes like
cloning and genetic engineering, that Christians should adjust to and readily accept as
legitimate means for conveying the gospel or glorifying God. Some have argued that
Evangelicals represent the backwash of American academia, but fail to demonstrate that
they are paragons of technical virtuosity.
1
Evangelicals are excellent at discerning
technological trends, capturing those mediums and even contributing and leading in their
development. Evangelicals have been at the forefront of social reform through adapting
to new circumstances created by rapid technological expansion that result in social
instability.
2
They have also contributed greatly to the development of technology through
printing techniques, radio, innovative uses of television as medium for evangelism and
propagation of conservative political ideology, cable and satellite TV and computerized
telemarketing technologies.
3
The use of multimedia and communication technologies
represent their greatest achievements, but they excel also at social forms of technology
such as, the market driven church, bureaucracy, entrepreneurialism, volunteerism and
business and advertising techniques used for church growth, which rank as staple diet for
Evangelical megachurches and televangelism.
4
The crisis in Evangelicalism's approach to technology lies between the doldrums
of academic and intellectual participation and witness and the ready acceptance of all
things technological. On the one hand we have neglected scholarship and critical thinking
as too liberal and accommodating to modern culture, and on the other hand argue that for
the church to reach people it must become culturally indigenous whether in Africa, Asia,
Latin America or Exurbia. "When the church's communication forms are alien to the host
population, they may never perceive that Christianity's God is for people like them."
5
We
must become all things to all people in order to save some (I Cor 9: 22). This argument
maintains that Evangelicals must adopt technological forms of communications in order
to express relevance to technological society. However, this position overlooks three
1
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eedermans, 1994); Alan Wolf, "The
Opening of the Evangelical Mind" in The Atlantic Monthly (October 2000), 55-76.
2
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2000).
3
Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1991), 54-55.
4
Charles Trueheart, "Welcome to the Next Church" in The Atlantic Monthly (August 1996), 37-58.
5
George Hunter, Church for the Unchurched (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 58; Trueheart, "Welcome
to the Next Church," 43.