Prophetic Responsibility

1
Prophetic Responsibility
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Learning Objectives

• Describe the need for a prophetic witness
  regarding technology.
• Describe message needing to be sent.
• Explain who is responsible for sending that
  message.
• Explain a strategy for sending that message.

3
The Need

• James Houston
• I appeal to evangelical Christians to use the
  whole range of their professional skills to speak
  prophetically about our times.
• We need deeper analyses of the pathology of
  scientific, technological, social and political
  evils in our contemporary world, in light of the
  eternal realities revealed in God's Word.
• A new missionary enterprise is involved to go
  virtually into every professional area of life,
  just as in the past we have emphasized the
  geographical penetration of our world with the
  gospel.

4
Prophetic Responsibility

• Mammoth Blasts The Message
• Jackpots Your Message
• Grannies Forms of Responsibility
• Donkers Your Responsibility
• Crushed Ice The Strategy
• Crackers Your Strategy

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The Message

• Confront the idolatry of technology.
• Sever the blind faith of technological
  progressivism
• Avoid complacency get involved
• Confront materialism
• Condemn technological evils
• Indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction
• Mind-controlling drugs for social management
• Eugenics
• Environmental degradation
• A message of responsibility

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Forms of responsibility

• Relationship to Christ
• Gifts, Talents, Calling
• Membership in society
• Men are men before they are lawyers, or
  physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers and
  if you make them capable and sensible men, they
  will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers
  or physiciansJohn Stuart Mill
• Occupation
• Position, Role

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A Strategy for Responsibility

• Develop a network of concern.
• Develop a broad perspective of decision-making
  means and ends
• Develop long-range ethical norms
• Develop an appropriate life-style
• Avoid conformity (restrict television)
• Recycle
• Maintain a garden, avoid convenience foods
• Live courageously

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CONCLUSION

• Responsible technology must rest upon a
  servant-like commitment to love God above all and
  one's neighbor as oneself. It is as all of
  us--designers, research scientists, consumers,
  public policy makers, citizens, fabricators,
  corporate executives, journalists, scholars, and
  others-seeking to love as Christ loved us that we
  will be able to live in the line of creation and
  redemption. We will then broaden the standards
  by which our technologically relevant decisions
  are made to simultaneously include all the
  biblically based normative principles, and at the
  same time narrow the application of the economic,
  the technical, the scientific, and the political.
  In so doing we will responsibly fulfill the
  ancient cultural mandate. We will become
  builders who work with, not against, God's good
  creation to bring out and develop the riches he
  has placed there.
• As we do so we will often feel like exiles in a
  strange and threatening land. Yet we have God's
  promise that our efforts will not be in vain.
  Faithfulness will bear fruit. It will be a
  harvest of God's choosing and timing, but a
  valuable harvest nonetheless, one worth the
  struggle and the wait.