assumption runs so deep in critiques of the internet that it is often difficult to separate it from the many other concerns already discussed here. I would argue that disembodiment, by and large, undergirds most of the theological accounts of the internet, if not the nontheological as well. There is a common perception that the increase of the virtual means a decrease of embodied experiences. We are worried that the body will become less relevant to human life. Surely there are some who would argue that human evolution is moving in this direction. So-called “transhumanists” speak of an existence beyond the confines and obstacles of the physical body.67 This makes theologians (and probably many non-theologians) understandably nervous. The experience of the body is central to how we have thought about what it means to be human since the question was first posed. It is possible that the resistance to transhumanism is at the root of an explosion of scholarship on the “body” from all kinds of academic disciplines.
In reaction to these transhumanist impulses, there has been a tendency to assert the reality of embodied experience over disembodied ones. Therefore, perhaps the most common expression of this particular anxiety over disembodiment is in the real/virtual binary. We saw this in Andrew Root’s comments about symbols above. The internet, according to Root, has created a realm of the “hyper-real,” which competes with the reality toward which the Christian community is oriented. He writes, “To proclaim the gospel is to speak of the real—most fully, Jesus Christ. But this Christ who is incarnate and crucified can only be found in existence itself, in the realness and fullness of the human experience.”68 But Root never defines “the realness and fullness of the human experience,” presumably because he doesn’t think he has to. He simply assumes that his words signal, by necessity, a non-digital experience. This is simply what he means when he uses words like “real,” “full,” and “human.”
The effect of this is to separate anything that can be described as “virtual” from being described as “real.” What is important is the assumption that genuine or real relies upon a particular version of embodiment, namely that which we perceive to be unmediated. This creates a kind of hierarchy of encounters among the unmediated and the digitally mediated. Should this remain a binary, however, it misses so much of human activity: most of our encounters—with objects, with ideas, and with one another—are mediated by something. Language and text are some of the most fundamental that come to mind.
It is not enough, however, to acknowledge the necessary mediation of human encounter. We must also acknowledge that digitally mediated experiences are, in fact, embodied, although perhaps not in the way we mean as we describe it as “disembodied.” Pursuing this question of embodiment and online experiences tends to expose the assumptions we carry into discussions of the body. It requires a body to engage with technology. Furthermore, the various mediations of virtual space—photos, sound, text—require sense experiences.
According to Graham Ward, the changes wrought by telecommunications include changes to our conception of space itself. They also include changes in our perceptions of what society is, and, in turn, what the individual is. As predicated on relationships between individuals, society is built upon negotiating trust and doubt. He argues, “With advanced telecommunications, forms of trusting are not only divorced from face-to-face encounter but become founded upon texts, their composition, transmission, and interpretation.”69 Ward is reminiscent of Miller here, arguing that the imagined space has thus become “internationalized.” He writes, “The internationalism of space produces international persons who are more diffuse, less embodied, more experimental, and less identifiable.”70 He goes on to argue that this view of the individual, a view in which the disembodied nature of our age plays an integral part, “denigrates being local such that material ‘locatedness’ is not in vogue.”71
Thus we have the appearance of one of the theological antidotes to the disembodied realm of the internet: the primacy of the local church community (again). Ward describes the vanishing relevance of the local: “How can an act of local responsibility—being a member of a town council or a volunteer in a regional project for the homeless—escape the sense of being arbitrary or parochial?”72 One can easily add participation in a church community as “an act of local responsibility.” Indeed, he goes on to argue that it is now the church’s onus to reassert “the importance of local and particular embodiment and of local and particular relations” in light of the changing technological and social landscape.73
Ward also argues that the internet is specifically about the transmission of text. The internet, he argues, “aspires to the pure act of reading, in which the interface between reader and text dissolves.”74 This particular article was written in 2002, before the advent of many of the technologies to which this observation might apply. One need only think of GoogleGlass, a device that places the computer interface into eyeglasses so that as one looks outward to the offline world, one is also peering into the online world. We are moving closer and closer, then, to the disappearing interface of which Ward speaks here. For Ward, this movement is theological. He writes,
The dreams of fully realistic virtual realities—the kind advertised in Star Trek’s holodeck—signal a desire for new textual immediacies. The trajectory of this desire is eschatological. It is a contemporary refiguring, after the various Enlightenment refigurings, of the city of God: a techno-redemption. The euphoria of certain apologists for cyberspace is an expression of a yearning for infinite freedom conceived as infinite light.75
The transhumanist impulse to free oneself from the body—to whatever degree it is present in current iterations of online life—is problematic for theologians for several reasons. In addition to the first theological locus of the church, which necessitates a being-together in physical space, a second theological locus emerges here: the Incarnation. The central conviction of the Christian church is that God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, a conviction that influences the Christian perspective on materiality’s place in the economy of grace. Thirdly, following from the Incarnation, is the resurrection, both of Jesus Christ and of ourselves. As Graham Ward puts it, “After all, resurrection is resurrection of the body.”76 Theologians have long seen it significant that the risen Christ is risen not in some ethereal, nonphysical form, but in a body, able to be touched by his disciples.
In order to argue for the internet as one of the Powers and Principalities, Bennett argues against the prevailing idea that the internet is primarily a disembodied space. She writes, “It is a body that must use the computer, check the email, navigate the avatar, reflect on how to interact with these people online.”77 But she, and any other theologian, must admit the importance of the local embodied community, especially for the sacramental life of the church. She writes, “The internet is not likely to be a proper site for participating in the sacraments or other physical forms of materiality that signify God’s grace.”78 The centrality of the sacraments and the “other physical forms of materiality” which participate in the sacramental order give a rather unavoidable preference to the local church. The centrality of this physically bounded community is incarnational; God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ changes the way in which Christians see the entirety of the created order. Therefore, both the local church (in its administration of the sacraments) and the Incarnation function as the two main theological loci for theological discussion of disembodiment in virtual life.
Conclusion: A Way Forward
Different Christian traditions have negotiated the place of “other physical forms of materiality that signify God’s grace” differently. The focus of the next chapter will be the Catholic tradition’s insistence upon physical objects and places in the sacramental order by virtue of an incarnational approach to the world.
I have attempted to describe several aspects of the internet that have been of particular concern to theologians. These five aspects are intimately related and often overlapping, and they often appear in nontheological approaches to the internet
