ABSTRACT
Around the beginning of the third century CE the Christian author Tertullian, writing in his treatise De praescriptione hereticorum, posed the question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian’s conclusion was that human philosophical constructions had little to offer to a Christian faith rooted in sacred revelation. While ultimately futile, Tertullian’s separation of these two things into two mutually exclusive categories is not uncommon, with similar “catch cries” calling for the separation of church and state, science and religion, and social action versus care of the soul running through Christian history. Perhaps too, we see a similar separation in the question asked in some quarters about what the Internet has to do with a faith founded on the life, death and resurrection of a first-century Palestinian Jew. For some, the Internet has no connection with a faith tradition rooted in identification with a physical community and a God who became flesh and blood and relocated to the physical world, but for others, the Internet represents a new location for theological reflection and exploration. Theology brings a different perspective from other disciplines to its engagement
with the Internet. While informed by scholarship from fields such as religion and media (e.g. Helland 2000; Dawson and Cowan 2004; Campbell 2010), theological reflection is primarily sourced from the religious tradition the theological scholars and practitioners participate in. As such, Christian theology about the Internet is set within a broad framework that sees the online world through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through this lens, attitudes and questions towards technology evolve regarding how Christians should live in relationship to the Internet, and intersect with the wider world with respect to social justice, identity, and ethics. Theology asserts that being sourced in certain truth claims about God and
the world, it has something to contribute to public and scholarly discussion about the Internet. Christian theology is cautiously optimistic about technologies like the Internet, with the caveat that all technology is open to being used oppressively, and seeks to bring insight drawn from its tradition on how to live well with the Internet. In this chapter, theology within the Christian tradition and its key approaches to technology are defined, leading into an examination of how theology has started to address concerns of interest within the church and the wider world.
