There is an easy dichotomy of two discourses: “science and religion,” engaged with claims about knowledge and reality, and “technology and ethics,” engaged with moral concerns about the way we use powers that science has placed in our hands. However, alongside the moral issues, technology also raises philosophical, theological, and anthropological issues—how we understand ourselves and the world, and hence, a need for reflection on “technology and religion.” That is obvious in the study of Michael S. Burdett in his Eschatology and the Technological Future. (By the way, Burdett also contributed to the September issue of Zygon: Journal of Science and Religion this year with the article “Assessing the Field of Science and Religion: Advice from the Next Generation”).

The first part of Burdett's study deals with “visionary approaches,” mostly optimistic in orientation: ideas about a technological utopia (changing the world) and transhumanism (changing our existence), with a chapter on science fiction and imagination in between. The second part deals with two theological responses to technological visions of the future, an optimistic, Christocentric one represented by Teilhard de Chardin, and a pessimistic, apocalyptic one represented by Jacques Ellul. The third part, “Philosophical and Theological Issues,” begins with a chapter on another influential thinker, Martin Heidegger, as an opportunity for Burdett to introduce the priority of possibility over actuality (or “ontology”), followed by the key theological proposal, “Possibility and Promise: A Christian Response,” and a concluding chapter, “Hope in a Technological World.” His main inspiration has been George Pattison, but all chapters—including those not signaling so in the chapter title—are engaging particular authors (e.g., Eberhard Jüngel and Richard Kearney on possibility and actuality, and Jürgen Moltmann on hope). The main distinction, introduced early in the book (3), is one between technological futurism—the future we expect to construct, which will arise from the present—and the future as that which will come toward us, as expressed in the German term Zukunft, or, to make the theological connotation more explicit, the Latin adventus—that which is coming toward us, not of our own making. Thus, Part 1 is about “technological futurism,” whereas Parts 2 and 3 bring in theological discourse of hope and promise (and, I would add, gratitude), and less a discourse of control and development. The book is very well documented, with notes and a bibliography for each chapter separately. It offers a Christian theology in relation to technology.