The Flaming Sword or No Way Home

Ἐγὼ γὰρ παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου, ὃ καὶ παρέδωκα ὑμῖν, . . .

Παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις, ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον, . . .

(from I Corinthians)

I'll be honest, I could be very happy in a very conventional church. I still remember weeping when, after more than 9 years abroad, I heard "For all the Saints" sung with the huge congregation, massed choir, and rich pipe organ at first church. This was my tradition. These were my people. After years of worshipping daily and weekly in other languages, in rented rooms, in re-worked theaters, I was home. The rest had been exciting, challenging, bracing, and growth inducing. But it wasn't home. 

That was 1991. I went back to Asia and then Europe before returning to the US again in 2004. And I realized that no click of the red slippers or intercontinental flight was going to take me back to that home now. First church was still there of course. Ranks of clergy in impressive robes and stoles, the massed choir, the organ, the hymns. But the world outside had changed. I had changed. My neighbors were changing. 

Part of this was demographic. The DFW Metroplex wasn't the urban/suburban environment I grew up in - it had become far more complex and interesting. But it was and still is deeply segregated and thus appears monolithic compared to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Vienna. I wasn't used to worshipping in a congregation of a single language and ethnicity, but that was first church all the way. The conventional UM church of 2004, or 2021 is a mirror in which you can see the past. 

But a taste for diversity wasn't all that was changing about me, or my peers. I had been deeply engaged in the personal computer revolution from its inception. I was doing all my work on a personal computer by 1984, and by 1994 was regularly using a personal digital assistant (who remembers Sidekick?). I wired my school in Singapore into the Internet a year later and was soon experimenting with using the web for instruction. And like many others, the depth of my engagement with virtual realities was only accelerating. By 1995 missionaries around the world were involved in virtual discussion boards mediated by satellite connections and re-distributed out of New Zealand on Compuserve. We weren't the only ones. 

Also accelerating was the extent to which human bodies were being integrated into and interpenetrated with technology. Even 20 years ago many of our bodies were basically hooked 24/7 to pharmaceutical manufacturers. Are you diabetic? Your life depends on a lifeline to a factory that manufactures what your body cannot. The same is true if you are a victim of countless diseases and deficiencies. A critical part of you is actually a machine outside your body, a machine itself increasingly under the control of artificial intelligence. Or maybe you have artificial knees, or hips, or a pacemaker, an insulin pump, a cochlear implant (or hearing aid), an artificial heart valve, replacements for the lens in your eyes, and so on. Just to live we have become increasingly part machine. 

And no end is in sight. Already there is artificial blood that can at least temporarily replace human blood, artificial skin to serve until the real thing grows underneath, and of course whole artificial limbs. Artificial hearts and kidneys exist now; livers are in process. Already in development are ways of moving the machines that once only worked outside our bodies inside our bodies. We think of "flesh and blood" as essential to our humanity, but are they really? At the very least Christian pastors and theologians must confront the reality of being human with soma but no sarx and aima. 

And yes, these replacements, these implants, are connected remotely to the devices that monitor them. Can they not be connected to one another? Of course they can. The loop recording device in my chest already sends messages to my cardiologist. It could certainly send a message to a device in another person across the world informing them of how my heart rate increases when I think of them. It could even stimulate dopamine pumps that would make them feel happy about it. Even the simulation of physical touch is quite possible in a virtual environment.

And there is more. In 1969 we saw our earth for the first time from the moon. In 1995 we got the first Hubble deep space photos, showing the billions of galaxies that make up the visible universe and giving us a more realistic sense of its size and our insignificance within it than ever before. Science had outstripped anything science fiction had offered our self-consciousness. Ancient models of the universe assured us that beyond the celestial spheres there lay the realm of God. We are looking back to the edge of creation and forward to the vast emptiness of an anthropic future and God had not yet appeared. Instead the Divine now lies both hidden and revealed by the anthropic principle, the fine tuning of the cosmic constant, the possibility of a multi-verse, and the fractal boundaries between the knowable and the unknowable. 

It is 2021 and the humans that walk the streets of my home town are no longer necessarily the humans of 1991. We have become bionic people who can live for extended periods of time in virtual worlds, or in real worlds where cultural complexity is the norm, not the exception. We live in a universe so vast that we are mere motes yet somehow strangely its existence is linked to our existence. The great conventional church now feels more like a refuge for avoiding this new humanity than a home for it. Sometimes that refuge feels like wonderful and warm. Sometimes it feels like a glorious tomb. 

So it is not relevant to our assessment of Covidtide that we’ve been through plagues before. Covidtide has simply stimulated the induced birth of a new kind of human for whom physicality and being present for others and God are not the necessarily the same thing.

This isn't about ethics, its about incarnation. 

This isn't the first time that this has happened in human history. New humanities have emerged periodically over our evolutionary history, most recently in much of the world with the advent of modernity. Taylor (A Secular Age) may be right that we are now "cross-pressured," but it is only because we aren't the same people we were 500 years ago. New accounts of human history such as Sapiens, and The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, are challenging us to rethink ourselves beyond Taylor's prescient observations. 

Under the joint pressures of changes to our experience of being embodied humans and our reconsideration of our human history our sense of our humanity is changing, evolving. New communities will inevitably evolve as well.

A recent opinion piece in the Religious News Service criticized the idea that now popular prayer and meditation apps could lead to real spiritual formation. The author asserts that from time immemorial commitment to an embodied community and collective identity is equally important. He doubts that spiritual growth is really possible without such a community and what is in effect a spiritual director of some sort. “Even the best-designed algorithms are unlikely to tend to the human soul adequately.”  https://religionnews.com/2021/11/26/prayer-apps-are-flooding-the-market-but-how-well-do-they-work/

It is tempting to be snarky and point out that traditional religious communities and spiritual directors have also been failures at “tending the human soul adequately;” which is one reason that across much of the world human souls are bowing out and prefer an app on their phone. But that misses the more important point: The emerging prayer and meditation apps aren’t individualistic alternatives to community. They are increasingly the focal point of a new kind of community: a virtual community. 

The use of an app doesn't necessarily mean the use of an algorithm, and in any case right now such apps garner hundreds of thousands of searches a week. Talk about a seeker service! And if you think such communities are not real consider the pain people feel when they are "ghosted" on social media, or when their favored social media gathering places are shut down. 

In five minutes an avatar built around an uploaded picture of my face can be in a 360 virtual space with other such avatars talking, sharing ideas, even playing virtual ping pong and basketball. That is right now, not the distant future. Are there virtual churches? Of course, and a whole industry devoted to helping create and foster them. 

Those VR capabilities will only grow, and they have the potential to overthrow the very structures of society. Will the church remain untouched? Let's not be ridiculous. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/opinion/metaverse-politics-disinformation-society.html

And we don't need to be.

When Paul drew the Corinthians into the emerging tradition of the followers of the resurrected Christ he was already engaged in creating a virtual community, one for whom the medium of presence was pen and ink, and sometimes a messenger bearing a letter. The Corinthians would never meet Ephesians, or Galatians, or Romans face to face, much less anyone from Jerusalem. Yet they were being knit into a community of radically different humans; humans who not only understood themselves differently because they were now participating in the resurrection of Christ, but who were actually different from what they had been before. 

They were also different in that their primary form of unity and shared presence was virtual. They were gathered from across the world not by physical proximity but by a shared tradition mediating a common experience. Lifted up above the earth Christ draws all to himself and thus into one another’s presence. What else has the communion of the saints ever been if not a virtual community? If Christ is the new Adam are not we who are born of his Spirit a new kind of humanity? 

I think part of our problem is that we can’t see a way of being human, and human for one another, that is neither tied to flesh and blood nor descends into gnosticism. Our theological imagination is too limited to deal with the challenges we now face. Yet surely as Christians we have more choices than two different rather individualistic heresies. Paul suggests in II Corinthians 5 that our essential humanity can be reclothed in what seems to be a communal non-physical cloth when we are one with the resurrected body of Christ. At the very least this suggests that we shouldn’t normalize the “earthly tent” in which we currently dwell as the only possible dwelling for an embodied community of faith. 

What was passed down to us, "traditioned" to be literal, are two historic realities. How we choose to embody them has always depended on our self-concept as humans and the social and culture situation in which we live. When those change, the church changes or it dies. Right now it is dying.

Four things: the increasing mechanization of the human person and closely related AI, the rise of virtual realities as a domain of human living, our understanding of the vastness and nature of the universe, and the witness of scripture demand this: that we assess with clear and open minds what it can and will mean to live both as humans and humans-in-community in the future. When we do we will discover that there is more to God incarnate than was captured in the Creeds, and more ways than we have imagined to be in one another’s presence and the presence of God.

And we’ll be reminded that always in times of change we must depend on the grace of Christ and the providence of God. They alone are unchanging.