Christ-marked

In his excellent Christian Ethics in a Technological Age , Brian Brock argues that despite modernity’s best efforts, “the Father of Jesus Christ has not allowed a secularizing West to succeed in erasing the heritage of centuries of divine judgment and reshaping of Western self-consciousness and institutions.” Brock takes a dim view of Christendom, quoting Kierkegaard’s definition of Christendom as “mankind’s continued effort through the centuries . . . to defend itself against Christianity,” but he also knows that “it is a defense not easily accomplished.” Thus, a non- or even anti-Christian thinker of the modern era cannot be taken at his word: “All heretics are only relatively heretical: one cannot oppose theology without being a theologian, that is, without waging war against some specific, if imagined, god.”

His opening chapter applies this logic to Heidegger’s account of technology. Embedded in that account he finds insights from the theology that Heidegger never escaped – “an interest in the plenitude of creation beyond the thoughts of creatures inherited from the medieval Scholastics” and “a theory or revelatory transformation inherited from the Reformers.” Heidegger wants to ask “How does something outside of me come to me and make me into its likeness?” Brock wants to re-frame the question, originally theological, by putting it back into its proper setting: “How does Christ come to us and meet us, transforming our being and action by making his subjects.” This is not a falsification of Heidegger; rather “the best way to read his work is as a set of reflections on questions whose terms have been set by the living Christ, and whose continued profundity will depend on reviving its attachment to its true orienting and enlivening source.”