laptops and iPads in offices and on buses. I have no evidence of who wrote this sentence about indulgences, and I have no evidence if he included “new means of communication” for more than what he assumed were practical reasons. I take this sentence, however, as a call for theologians to be ever attentive to the means of communication as they relate the economy of grace. This project is a response to that call.
I remember exactly where I was when I first learned about the internet. I stood in the room of a teenage girl, the daughter of a family friend who had called my technologically savvy father over for help. “She wants to be on the Web,” her father told mine, “but I’m having trouble with the connection.” I learned that “the Web” was a way for people to talk to each other through their computers. I stared in awe at the blank screen of the monitor, turned off for my father’s inspection, trying to ignore the passing thought, Why wouldn’t they just use the telephone?
My sensitivity and attraction to the internet as a subject of study has not little to do with the fact that the internet and I grew up together. I think of myself as a second-generation digital immigrant, fluent in the language and culture of the internet but old enough to remember a time before it. My technological biography is just different enough from the students I now teach (mostly born in the late 1990s) that I can still be to be impressed and puzzled by it, such that I would see it as a topic for research at all.
In what follows, I argue that internet technology is in need of theological reflection that centers on the category of mediation. I will not be discussing the place of projectors, big screens, iPads, etc. in the worship space. I have opinions about these things, but they are not altogether scholarly. I will leave such questions up to pastors, lay leaders, theologians, and other experts in liturgical matters. Instead, I am interested in technology as a culture, and its relationship to the church. The Christian tradition has a vested interest in technological culture not only because the church is in the world and cannot be otherwise, but also because questions about technology invite questions about mediation. And religion is about mediation.
I would like to argue two related points as foundational to a theology of the internet. First, I would like to advance the idea that Christian liturgy can be understood as virtual. This is an expansion and concretization of the idea of religion as mediation. Second, I would like to propose that the virtual nature of Christian liturgy—and indeed, the virtual nature of the church itself—turns toward a self-reflective theological analysis of the internet. I propose under this second point that the internet has changed what it means to be social to such a degree that we must now understand its social spaces as ancillary to the liturgical spaces of the tradition.
The thesis I advance is as follows: As virtual space, the internet can be understood theologically through the doctrinal loci of the Incarnation and the church. These two doctrines pervade both scholarly and ecclesial discussions of technology and the internet to date, and remain the central doctrinal categories with which theologians should assess internet culture. In its broader sacramental imagination and its ecclesiology, the church relies on virtual space insofar as it relies on the productive tension between presence and absence. Furthermore, the social possibilities of the internet afford the church great opportunity for building a social context that allows the living out of Eucharistic logic within what I term “ancillary spaces.” These spaces are necessary to the life of the church, and rather than lamenting the disappearance of their traditional iterations, I suggest that we pay close attention to their new residence in the digital context.
Chapter 1 presents the state of the theological question. I argue here that theological reflection on internet technology centers on five main concerns: anonymity, vitriol, authority, access, and disembodiment. The two dominant doctrinal loci for addressing these concerns have been the Incarnation and the church. Though I begin to offer some thoughts on each of the five theological concerns, I propose in the conclusion of this chapter that theologians focus more on the ways in which Catholicism is beholden to mediation, given that so much theological work has focused on the mediating structures of the internet as sites for theological concern.
Chapter 2 reviews ecclesial documents on technology and social communication. Here I argue that church teaching on these matters has focused mostly on the doctrines of Incarnation and the church as well to address the technological issues of a given time. Throughout the twentieth century, the church remained cautiously optimistic about the role of technology in society. After the Second Vatican Council, and especially during the pontificates of John Paul II and Francis, official church statements acknowledge the inevitable interconnectedness of social communications and the church, as well as the possibilities for living out the mission of the church in precisely that context.
Chapter 3 is a theological account of mediation, with particular attention to the doctrinal locus of the Incarnation. Drawing on the work of computer scientists, I argue that the sacramental imagination of the church, as Incarnational, is reliant upon an understanding of mediation now conceptually available because of digital culture. In chapter 4, I apply the category of “virtual” to two ecclesial spaces: (1) Paul’s letters and (2) replica grottoes of Lourdes. I argue that the sacramental imagination that characterizes Catholicism relies upon a virtual logic insofar as it trades on the productive relationship between immediacy and hypermediacy.
Chapter 5 turns to the social dynamics of the internet. It reviews relevant scholarship from internet studies and other (non-theological) fields that attempt to describe and critique the emerging social life of online environments. Chapter 6 provides a sociological argument about the state of the Catholic Church in the United States, namely that its primary social context is suburbanization. I present this sociological and historical narrative in the context of scholarship about the internet in order to introduce the argument of the final chapter.
Chapter 7 is the theological culmination of the project. I argue that by understanding the sacramental economy of the church in terms of symbolic exchange, the church will be poised to address the sociological challenges facing the living out of the Eucharistic logic that forms the liturgical assembly. The first half engages the work of Henri de Lubac, whose Eucharistic ecclesiology presents an optimistic vision of the church. De Lubac argues for Eucharist-centered ecclesiology, but I argue that he is insufficiently attentive to the sociological challenges to the church’s living out of Eucharistic logic. I go on to argue that Louis-Marie Chauvet’s sacramental theology is helpful in addressing these challenges. Specifically, Chauvet’s focus on “symbolic exchange” gives us a standard for communion by which we can assess both the church and the culture in which it carries out its mission. Therefore, symbolic exchange is a theological hermeneutic for the phenomenon of the internet and its possibilities vis-à-vis the Catholic Church.
I conclude with the observation that there are two forces at work in this project. I began my research with the desire to bring theological categories to bear on the social phenomenon of the internet. In the end, however, I discovered that this analysis alone is insufficient in light of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and indeed a much longer history of the church’s relationship with the world. I hope to demonstrate that a fuller theological engagement with internet culture means bringing the categories of digital life to bear on the life of the church. It is only in being open to this second dynamic that theologians can contribute to a church that preserves timeless truths at the same time that it acknowledges itself as a community in space and time.
NOTES
1. “Pope Francis: His First Words,” Radio Vaticana, accessed June 25, 2015. http://en.radiovaticana.va/storico/2013/03/13/pope_francis_his_first_words_/en1-673112. Emphasis mine.
2. I opt not to capitalize the word “internet” throughout this project. One sees “internet” capitalized in both scholarly and popular texts, although other authors have chosen not to as well. For me, this is not just a matter
