Spilt Wine, Torn Wineskins

Ἐγὼ γὰρ παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου, ὃ καὶ παρέδωκα ὑμῖν,  (I Corinthians 11:23) 

Παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις, ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον, . . .(I Corinthians 15:3)

I’ll be honest, I could be very happy in a very traditional 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 culture. 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 is still racially 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 church was a mirror in which you could see only the past. 

But that 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. I wired my school in Singapore into the Internet a year later and was soon experimenting with using the World Wide Web for instruction. And like many others, the depth of my engagement with virtual realities was only accelerating. 

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, kidneys, livers, and so on are already 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. They already are. The loop recording device in my chest can 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 stimulate dopamine pumps that would make them feel happy about it. The simulation of physical touch is quite possible in a virtual environment, and the stimulation of emotion without the touch is also possible. 

It is 2021 and the humans that walk the streets of my home town are no longer 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. The great traditional church now feels more like a refuge for avoiding this new humanity than a home for it. Sometimes that refuge feels attractive, sometimes it feels like a glorious tomb. 

It is not relevant to our assessment of Covidtide that we’ve been through plagues before. We are seeing 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.

Just look at the pain people feel when they are “ghosted” on social media, or the loss of community when their online group is “canceled.” These are reminders that there is more to communion, to being present with others, than physical presence. And the church must discover what it is. We need a new theological anthropology that accounts for the inevitable emergence of new humanities less constrained by physicality than the old.  We need to accept that human nature is actually changing, evolving, and the caricatures, I mean characterizations we’ve relied on to understand ourselves may no longer serve.

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. Indeed the first church growth conference for churches existing entirely in the virtual environment Meta (Facebook) is already schedule. Put on your Oculus 360 VR goggles and you can meet me there.

Anyway the use of an app doesn’t necessarily mean the use of an algorithm. And more importantly, since algorithms are now part of our daily human experience what do we make of them theologically? If we can’t answer that question with something other than resistance then we are already behind the rest of society by decades.

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 meant? If Christ is the new Adam are 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 descents into gnosticism. But 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 communal 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.

Three things: the increasing mechanization of the human person, the rise of virtual realities as a domain of human living, and witness of scripture demand 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. We will discover that there is more than we know of how to be in one another’s presence and the presence of God.

Next week I’ll look at how much of what we call tradition is really just nostalgia, and how we need to get over it if we are to embody the Christian tradition in the future.