Christ and Modernity: Christian Self-Understanding in a Technological Age

Jenifer Lepiano was a writer and drama teacher in Toronto.

This is a vigorous and invigorating historical review of Christian thinking about what it means to be Christian, with an eye to understanding modern man’s relationship to the natural world and his development of technology. Hawkin subscribes to H.E.W. Turner’s concept of the lex orandi, the “faith response to the giveness of God,” which he sees as the link between spirituality and theology. Christian doctrine is, he believes, a dynamic of fixed and flexible elements and for this reason he resists pronouncements, whether those of Jacques Ellul and George Grant against technology or those of the supporters of a biblical argument in favour of technological development. His conclusion that “human autonomy is not at all incompatible with a nurturing and conserving attitude towards God’s creation” will scarcely surprise; the shakeups come along the way.

Hawkin begins his study with an excellent critique of enlightenment Christology and its impact on contemporary understanding of Jesus Christ. He then doubles back to consider the relationship between orthodoxy and heresy in the formulation of early church doctrine before returning to contemporary writers. Hawkin is able to overview a vast expanse of material without obscuring its detail, presenting the thought realms of Darwin, Freud, Marx, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche as a single landscape he calls modernity. Hawkin’s belief that the loss of meaning inherent in the modern break with classicism is answered once and for all by the Christian message has not numbed his sense of the extraordinary challenges posed daily by life in the modern world. These, he states clearly, can be resolved only through an active participation in the process of the lex orandi.