More on digital man, digital church
Jemimah has responded to my previous post with some thoughts of her own on this vexed topic of man's "digital life" (for want of a better term). I have a series of further sketches on this topic below.
Man is the kind of being who can take things into himself through the act of knowledge, apparently from vast distances. This isn’t unique to our modern era of telecommunications technology; we have been able to do this as long as we have had news of any kind: “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” (Prov. 25:25). It is possible for humans to be mentally present in places that are far distant from them physically; so your friend writes to you, hearing of your recent misfortune: “My thoughts are with you at this time.”
“Digital life” is largely a development of this age-old phenomenon of having your mind extended to matters far away. What seems to have changed in the digital age is the frequency of these communications, and their fidelity, and these really are significant developments.
We have had the daily newspaper and the nightly news for many decades now, and those media certainly made national and international affairs constantly present to the local mind in a way that wasn't possible previously. But the frequency has increased dramatically in the internet age: I can now engage with persons and matters that are far away, dozens of times a day. My mind can constantly be somewhere else than my locality.
High-speed internet has also made it possible to have high-fidelity, real-time conversations with others. We aren’t yet at a point where I might be deceived into believing that I am somewhere other than where I really am, but Zoom conversations are already a rough and ready alternative to personal conversations or meetings in the office. As Jemimah notes,
human agents become localised in a digital version of ‘space’ and present to other ‘users’ of this space in a manner that does not occur through the phone call or the long-awaited letter, or even the television which, while also visual, is non-participatory by nature.
As I write this, I have recently been appearing in a Court hearing here in town. Due to a sheriff’s strike this week, the court house was closed each day after 1:30 pm. But judicial power cannot now be stopped by these physical impediments: each day, the parties simply logged into Webex and we picked up where we left off. What occurred was quite remarkable: Her Honour spoke towards a camera and microphone, and in my office, I witnessed a real-time simulacra of Her Honour’s visage and voice. The judicial power of the State of New South Wales was truly exercised towards the parties and their legal representatives, as we each engaged with local symbols of the far-away presence of the others. The judiciary made honest-to-goodness binding determinations about various matters, though Her Honour sat all the while in an empty courtroom.
The part of this arrangement which most readily breaks the illusion is that, as Her Honour enters the court room, the court officer still announces, “All stand—this Court is now sitting”. There is no requirement for practitioners on video to stand, or to bow, as one would in a real courtroom. The removal of this minor element from the “liturgy” of appearing in Court does erode the formality of the Court ever so slightly.
Part of what it means to be human extends beyond the boundaries of our physical bodies. Humanity extends also to the relationships between individual men, between men and their places, and between men and things. Consider what it means to love your neighbour as described in the Ten Words: it is not merely a matter of preserving the integrity of his body (“Thou shalt not kill”), but also his relationships (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”), personal property (“Thou shalt not steal”), and his reputation (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”).
The ninth commandment in particular amounts to a "murder" of your neighbour's good name, and the image that other people have of him. That is a genuine feature of his life, and to harm his name is to harm him. We exist, in part, in the minds of others. It is of course possible to break the ninth commandment by means of digital technology. Why, I’ve even known it to happen from time to time.
In my previous post, I suggested families or nations formed by the mediation of digital technology as absurd cases. In these examples we can see more clearly why digital mediation does not suffice to ground certain kinds of relationships. We could imagine, say, a husband and wife having a conversation between their respective blogs, but they could not be established as a married couple by mere transmission of data.
Likewise, a commonwealth could not be formed by having several persons join a WhatsApp group and declaring the group admin to be their king. It is true that nations do not always have their own territory, since a nation can be dispossessed and relocated; nonetheless, they always have some physical proximity to each other in some shared place. The people must, at some level, be together.
The ability to communicate to others one’s thoughts, or even a visual representation of one’s own person, does not itself overcome in every case what is lacking in the inability to give one’s actual bodily presence to others in a shared place.
It is a mistake to think of place as a mere means to transmit data. With such an understanding, telecommunications may be considered a plausible alternative to shared place, doing the same job of data transmission just as well, if not better: transmitting data without the risk of transmitting viral particles.
John Calvin’s thought on the Eucharist (arguably) centres upon what he calls the “spiritual presence” of Christ. This term does not mean what we might initially take it to mean, that only Christ’s omnipresent divine nature is present at the Lord’s table, or that Christ is mentally present to believers as they think about him during the rite; rather, it is that the Holy Spirit nourishes believers with the real human nature of Christ, notwithstanding the great distance between heaven and earth:
I say that although Christ is absent from the earth in respect of the flesh, yet in the Supper we truly feed on his body and blood—that owing to the secret agency of the Spirit we enjoy the presence of both. I say that distance of place is no obstacle to prevent the flesh, which was once crucified, from being given to us for food. [Calvin, Clear Explanation of Sound Doctrine; cited in Keith Mathison, Given For You: Reclaiming Calvin's Doctrine of the Lord's Supper, 31]
Since the Holy Spirit can make the human nature of Christ present to believers at vast distances, might it be possible for a believer to feed on the flesh of Christ by faith from the comfort of his home, eating a morsel of bread while watching a Eucharistic service on YouTube? In such a case, not only is Christ made present to the gathered believers, but the believers themselves are "gathered" in the first place by digital technology.
There is a true kind of virtual gathering of the church, in that the local church is "virtually" gathered in heaven with all other local churches to worship God by the operation of the Spirit (Hebrews 12). But the spiritual gathering together of God’s people is envisaged in Scripture as an extension of bodily gathering, not a replacement of it.
This highlights the problem with "digital church": in practice, it sidesteps bodily gathering entirely, except as an optional means to achieve an end that you might have achieved otherwise.
But as with the family or the nation, bodily presence is not merely a means to transmit data from one member to another: to be present in bodily communion with others is very much part of the point. The church is not merely a means for each individual member to acquire certain goods for himself; rather the joining of individual members into a social body is the point; so Augustine says, “the life of a city is inevitably a social life” (Augustine, The City of God, bk. XIX, ch. xviii).