Digital man, digital church
Myles Werntz reviews a handful of books about the recent phenomenon of "digital church". He summarises one book, Richard Burridge’s Holy Communion in Contagious Times, as follows:
The idea of avatars is treated by Burridge not so much as an emergency accommodation but as a clarified description of reality that the emergency has surfaced. He asks whether digital life is now so wrapped up in our understanding of existence as to make hard-and-fast distinctions between digital and nondigital life moot. If digital life is so thoroughly enmeshed with what it means to be a human, then—under the right conditions, such as an avatar—Burridge suggests that online church remains an intelligible option. For an avatar—as enmeshed with the person behind the image—would be an extension of the self, capable of receiving the digital extension of the physical Eucharist.
If I may put it another way: since our understanding of human life, especially in our social and communal dimensions, has extended to the digital realm, it makes sense that the church could extend to these digital aspects of man's life. (This seems a bizarre spin on Peter Leithart's dictum that the church is salvation in social form.)
However, the phenomenon of digital church seems to me a reductio ad absurdum of this digital anthropology, and perhaps it invites us to wonder if some way back we made a misstep about what it really means to be human. Is the church something that one can truly participate in by having each individual Christian watch it on a livestream? We could push the question further: could we have families, or cities or nations whose sociality is entirely mediated digitally? I have my doubts, to say the least.