The Sacramental Technologist, Part I: A Translucent Creation

In recent years, Paul Kingsnorth has provided a fascinating analysis of modern culture in terms of “The Machine” – how technology replaces nature. It’s reminiscent of the historian Henry Adams 100 years ago, who famously contrasted the symbol of the Middle Ages – the Virgin (Mary) – with the modern symbol of the Dynamo.

Personally, I am firmly on the side of those who say machines today are making us less human. But all reactions risk swinging the pendulum too far the other way. Good theology has proper balance. I suggest we need to find ways to apply the word “sacrament” to some aspect of technological action, which is rooted not only in creation, but in God’s desire to make himself known through creation.

Sacrament is the word for things the church does, where God works through our actions to bless his people. Protestants are most familiar with Baptism and Holy Communion. Catholics, Orthodox, and some of my fellow Anglicans include confirmation, marriage, ordination – things like that. For the first 1000 years of Christianity, believers weren’t too concerned about the exact number – 2 or 3 or 7. Augustine listed many more. And that’s because he had a much more expansive view: Sacraments are visible means of invisible grace.[1] God works through visible means to produce his invisible ends. Never apart from faith, never apart from grace, always because of Christ, who took on visible flesh to work out our redemption. Theologically, “sacrament” isn’t just a noun, 2 or 3 or 7 rituals the church does; it’s an adverb about how God loves to work in the world: he works sacramentally.

In a sacramental view of the world, the reason God uses certain matters of creation for specific sacraments – water for baptism, bread and wine for Eucharist – is because natural creation has an inherent ability to be used by God, to provide a kind of resonance between the divine and human. God made visible creation capable of conveying invisible reality. The theologian Hans Boersma, in his book Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry put it more concisely: “created matter is meant to serve eucharistically.”[2]

When we say that the trees of the field will clap their hands, we’re not just saying that swaying branches look like hands clapping. We’re not just saying they were made by God. We’re saying that their existence and their purpose is to give glory to God, if we will have eyes to see it.[3]

And not just in the trees, but literally all things should be vehicles for the presence of God. 1 Corinthians 15:28 says the Christ’s victory will result in a world where “God may be all in all.”

The great book on this is For the Life of the World, by Alexander Schmemann. He comments on that verse:

The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all. … The natural dependence of man upon the world was intended to be transformed constantly into communion with God in whom is all life. Man was to be the priest of a eucharist, offering the world to God, and in this offering he was to receive the gift of life.

Man does not know that breathing can be communion with God. He does not realize that to eat can be to receive life from God in more than its physical sense. He forgets that the world, its air or its food cannot by themselves bring life, but only as they are received and accepted for God's sake, in God and as bearers of the divine gift of life.[4]

The ecclesial sacraments, therefore, act as the beginning of a broader sacramental theology, where we can see the authorship of God, feel the presence of God, and live in accordance with the purposes of God in his material reality.

Next, I will trace how we can put this into practice in our relationship to nature, and in relationship to our modifications of nature – technology.

[1] Cf. Augustine, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, 50.26

[2] Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 8.

[3] Medieval theologians had a logical rule they worked out. They said: “Every agent causes something similar to itself.” Omne agens agit sibi simile. That is, every agent (whatever produces or changes something) always leaves its mark on whatever it effects. If I hit the 6 ball into the 8 ball. The speed and direction of the 6 ball leave their effect on the resulting speed and direction of the 8 ball. A parent leaves their imprint on their child. And – crucially – God is also an agent, he produces an effect on creation, that makes it similar to him.

This middle way between (1) God being on the same level as our existence, and (2) God being completely different than our existence, is called the analogy of being. It says that there is an imprint of God that we can understand, while always recognizing that God is even more different than he is similar – he can never be comprehended. Cf. the 2nd Constitution of the 4th Lateran Council (1215): “between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.” “Fourth Lateran Council,” Papal Encyclicals Online, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm. Accessed 4/21/2025.

The analogy of being clarifies: Creation is not the same as God. That would be pantheism. But it is not totally different from him, either. That is why creation can serve sacramentally to offer God’s presence to us, if we receive it by faith.

[4] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1998), 16-17.