Countering the Technological Era with Worship: A Theological Response to the Insights of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-160-9_31How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Ethic; Politic; Theology; Technology worship

Abstract

The common view that technology is ethically neutral and not intrinsically harmful to humankind has been challenged in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul. They both reject a simplistic interpretation of technology and maintain a distinctive view of “modern” technology and its repercussions. Heidegger believes modern technology affects our understanding of “being.” Ellul argues that modern technology has automatically augmented itself into a system which entraps humanity, curtailing humankind’s freedom, and even redefining humanity. In other words, modern technology has started to rule over humanity. Thus, the danger of the technological era, driven by modern technology, is by nature not merely ethical, but systemic. Both Heidegger and Ellul suggest that the countermeasure to this entrapment lies in elements which can be related to the transcendent. This paper attempts to conceptualize this proposed solution through the Christian’s understanding of worship, suggesting that via a certain fundamental posture of worship, the recovering of true “being” in Heidegger is made possible and the dialectical theology of Ellul can be concretized.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Khee-Vun Lin
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/12/14
TI  - Countering the Technological Era with Worship: A Theological Response to the Insights of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Theology, Humanities and Christian Education 2022 (ICONTHCE 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 285
EP  - 294
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-160-9_31
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-160-9_31
ID  - Lin2023
ER  -