I want to address in this article the concept of Digital Being and what this might mean – to be followers of Christ thoroughly immersed in digital culture – with a particular focus on our embodied selves. Of course, the very technological revolution which has given rise to our new digital condition, and which perhaps might one day offer a solution beyond it, is seen by some as part of the problem. But technology is not just an evil. And, indeed, technology is certainly not new to the practice of religion. As an expression of human experience of the divine across most cultures and particularly in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, as John Dyer has shown, religion has always been technologically orientated. We become image bearers/ living replicants who are in turn technologists/co-creators/builder of worlds, as Elaine Graham writes. Like online church, onsite church has always made use of multiple technologies – speech/language, visuals, acoustics, architecture, art, music, liturgy, ritual. The idea that onsite church is not itself technologically driven is incorrect – it’s just that the technology is so old and embedded into all we do, we have had time to overcome its novelty (Graham, 227). Indeed, when digital technology offered an opportunity to overcome some of the imposed distance and isolation caused by the recent pandemic and its associated lockdowns many chose to critique online church, indeed ‘digital being’ itself, as second best. Digital Church, many argued, did not offer ‘real’ church, a view which favoured a radically materialist concept of ‘Church’ in apparent ignorant of the global church, the Church Triumphant, or even the link between earthly worship and the worship of Heaven. Heidi Campbell has usefully proposed different models to explore the concept of ‘Internet embodiment’ (Campbell, 2004). The bigger question is whether public critique of online church has fully engaged with digital being and our experience of ‘being human in a digital age’. And here it is important to introduce or remind ourselves of Heidegger’s own concept of human being encapsulated in his interpretation ‘Dasein’. This is a sense of ‘being’ that is Crucible January 2023 Seeing through News Bias: Bringing a Christian Perspective 23 always experienced contextually, as a sense of ‘“the “thrownness” [Geworfenheit] of the human entity into its “there”’, that is, into its lived contextuality (Heidegger, 1962, 174). For the Church this means considering what it might mean for our worship, our communications our fellowship to take place primarily in a digital context. Recognising our digital ‘thrownness’ Recently the context of the vast majority of the world has been that of a pandemic which has excluded many from church buildings and services in them. Amanda Lagerkvist has suggested that both world and church have been ‘thrown into our digital human existence, where the ambivalent and massive task awaiting us is to seize our vulnerable situatedness, while navigating through sometimes unknown waters” (Lagerkvist, 97). She understands digital thrownness negatively, as burden imposed upon us by a pandemic made worse by technology. In critiquing the excited language of early adopters of social media technologies she argues that we should call on the concept of the exister who lives within the thrownness of a constantly and rapidly changing world: I have posited a human being for the digital human condition as exister, that is a precarious, embodied, relational, mortal creature; sometimes at loss, bewildered, and in search for meaning before the abyss. She is imbricated in socio-technological ensembles, traversing these terrains more or less successfully, in search for what may be cautiously termed existential security... [She is] the human being who sometimes stumbles, falls, misunderstands, struggles, is vulnerable, hurting, speechless, and finds no solution; but who may also experience moments of ultimate meaning, community, support, and fullness, as she navigates through the torrents of our digital existence. (Lagerkvist, 107) In his own exploration of digital life, Tim Markham talks of ‘digital thrownness’ in more sociological terms – as the empirical experience of contemporary life – the sense that our being (our ‘Dasein’) is always experienced in media res, in the midst of the prevailing pan-global hypermediatised culture (Markham, 3). Markham’s insistence is that our world is what it is and our ‘media res’, our ‘thrownness’ is digitality. Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 24 However, much as we chafe against this reality, however hard we find it, it is the reality into which we are ontologically thrown. It is the world into which the Word was made flesh, like us. But the question needs to be how we remain actors, as the Word did, within that world, rather than passive receivers of what the world throws at us. Interestingly, of course, it precisely in John’s theology of the Word that Christ gives himself up and that Synoptic notions of Christ as victim are resisted. Elaine Graham, while accepting our role in creating the tools of technology also insists, somewhat contrary to Markham, that the very process of human tool-making can have a transcendent effect on human nature in that it allows humans to transcend their lived experience. She picks up on Hefner’s more hopeful discussion of transcendence as: ‘a fundamental element of both human nature and technology – transcendence in the sense of imagining and believing and co-creating what is not actual, and creating the meaning of what is imagined, as well.’ (Graham, 227) As we have seen, in Heidegger’s presentations/writings, technology is often seen as an actor, an agent, a system, rather than a socially constructed tool. Heidegger’s original argument in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ was that humans authentically ‘dwell’ when they ‘indwell’ their surroundings, when they actively, purposefully foster relationships with the rest of creation represented in what Heidegger calls ‘das Geviert’, the fourfold of earth, sky, gods and humans. Graham, though, insists that ‘the task of “knowing our place” in the universe is about forging right relationships with these elements: of locating our embodied, creative, imaginative humanity as “builders of worlds”, to use Heidegger’s term, in relation to the integrity of nature, the transcendence of God, and the fragile and creaturely nature of humanity.’ Graham queries whether this is a better interpretation of the imago dei, which is often assumed to be about rationality or relationship. But both of these characteristics are increasingly recognised as applying to aspects of non-human life. Might this imaging of the divine, be more about our imagination, our transcendence, our building of worlds? She asks whether we need to celebrate: ‘that humanity shares in God’s creative capacity for bringing new worlds into existence ... both in our material fabrication and in our ability to ascribe meaning to the worlds we build ... the mark of the image of God in us’ (Graham, 227). Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 25 What, then, of embodiment? In both online and onsite church activities participants are always embodied, always in person: digital being is just another mode of embodiment, as Markham asserts. Our embodiment is part both of our being and our being thrown. But we also normatively transcend embodiment while remaining embodied. Through our imagination and creativity as well as through our proximal location, we are both transcendent and immanent beings. It is our bodies which always operate technology through our physical attributes whether that technology is the hymnbook or the keyboard. We share in worship through the audio-visual portrayal of Christ crucified and resurrected through microphones, audio devices, headphones, hearing aids, glasses, televisions, screens (onsite and online), cameras and the theatre of the liturgy and architecture itself. Our senses are bound up in worship whether we are onsite or online. To say that those worshipping online divest their physical identity for something more gnostic, more digital, less embodied, is a fundamental misunderstanding of how we exist/act/worship as human beings. To be online is to be as embodied, as open to God, as human, as vulnerable, as real, as it is to be onsite. It is the Incarnation of the Logos which is the theological proof of our embodiment. For as Christ is the image of the invisible God, so too we bear the image of God ourselves. Christ became what we are, that we might become what he is. Indeed, that Christ remains eternally embodied is reflected in Paul’s arguments about our own embodiment after death in 1 Corinthians 15. Graham talks of strengthening our concept of human nature in order to strengthen our ontology in response to the increasing ontological heft of technological culture (Graham, 222). But do we also need to strengthen our own concepts of the Incarnation in order to counter the increasing ontological heft of gnostic/stoic culture around the incarnation? Is this part of the cause of dualistic reflections on the digital self? Sometime ago, my wife and I went to see the York Mysteries. As we sat in our seats overlooking the massive wooden stage area, we noticed a man, dressed like a kind of New Romantic Dr Who, drawing equations on the ground in chalk, and then the action of creation began first through language, through the shaping of light, and being. For me, the opening was an affirmation of God the technologist: that God made use of science to create. Indeed, even Genesis 1 makes clear that God made use of the science of language to speak creation into Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 26 existence. In John’s Prologue too we have hints in the opening of Logos in conversation with God – hints which led Erasmus to propose the translation of Logos as ‘sermo’, ‘conversation’. The interplay of God and Logos shapes light, shapes that which came to be, initiates the universe. So Gregerson’s exploration of God’s engagement with quantum includes a section on the creation of the world where God provides both the energy to shift the change of state of all things and the information to direct the shaping of that change (Gregersen, 2010, 342). Deep incarnation and materiality Gregersen’s core research is in the area of deep incarnation – the argument that if we are to take incarnation seriously, we need to see the incarnation of the divine as something which has an eternal impact on Godself: ‘Deep incarnation presupposes a radical embodiment that reaches into the roots (radices) of material and biological existence as well as into the darker sides of creation: the tenebrae creationis’ (Gregersen, 2015, 226). Indeed, Gregersen believes in a God who embraces materiality, becomes involved in the world, shares creaturely experiences from, with and through Christ, and takes sides with the victims of evolution and social injustice. God, for Gregersen, creates a universe where everything lives in deep continuity with other beings and, as such, God cannot be an individual body but rather exists as an infinity concept co-terminous with/alongside the universe itself. This cosmic God must embrace all creaturely life ‘feeling and experiencing material existence from the inside out, while sharing the joys and sufferings of God’s own creatures’, which in turn are assumed eternally into Godself (Gregersen, 2016, 4). God becomes the initiator of quantum processes regardless of their (potentially destructive) consequences. God, as Teilhard had argued, becomes the embodiment of Love within the universe. Not a kind of sentimental love which saves the universe from entropy or from the vicissitudes of quantum processes, from death itself. Instead, God embodies an amoral love: a love which both the elements of the universe free to be what they need to be, to have freedom to be. Richard Bauckham and John Polkinghorne (in Gregersen, 2015), from quite different positions, disagree with Gregersen’s depiction of a God who seems to be impersonal, stretched out to encompass/exist alongside/with the universe rather than to be the personal identity Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 27 who interacts with that universe and with humanity as one aspect of it. God seems to have no independence from creation, from quantum, from the process of being. God seems to be wholly identified with something co-existent with the universe/as the universe contrary to the biblical depiction of a God who is separate from that which is created and who engages intimately with humanity on a much more personal way that Gregersen’s God ever could. Similarly, for Gregersen, the incarnation of the Logos, while still referring to the Logos enfleshed as Christ, focuses much more on the eternal implications on the Godhead. By becoming flesh as a human (not ‘becoming human’, insists Gregersen), the Logos introduces materiality into the Godhead – all materiality. Just as the man Jesus is made of the dust of the stars, so this too is brought into Godself and God experiences through this materiality the presence of all life – all humans, foxes, sparrows, the grass. Intriguingly, Gregersen limits/ omits an exploration of the historical life of Jesus – a point critiqued by others in the collection. But Gregersen counters that we have focused too much on the person/embodiment of Jesus even whilst the historical tradition has shown how little we know of who Jesus was and what he thought (pace the Quest[s] for the Historical Jesus). As such, he argues, we cannot really reflect on Jesus’ own understanding of God or indeed on his inner relationship with God, on his motives or actions. The importance of Jesus is not in his earthly life, but in his role of eternally incorporating materiality into Godself. We might think that Gregersen is in danger of de-personalising God and excarnating Jesus. If the Logos became flesh (ensarkos), then surely this must mean that the Logos was once without flesh. Indeed, we might read this into the history of the concept of Logos/ Sophia within the Hebrew Bible/Philonic traditions which talk more of a concept, an aspect of God, rather than an enfleshed persona. Gregersen’s response is that all persons of the Godhead as eternal aspects of Godself share the infinity concept – a version of the concept that Christ is eternal and there was no moment when Christ was not embodied. So, Gregersen argues, the Logos has always been embodied (as stardust) – using verses which talk of Jesus being slain before creation as a statement of this internalising of history into the eternity of Godself rather than talking of intent. As such, the Logos has always been enfleshed, always pro-creation, pro-freedom, proinclusion of all in Godself. So, too, the Logos has been eternally and universally salvific but that the moment of incarnation was anchored Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 28 within the life of Jesus of Nazareth when the infinity concept was, as Wesley put it, ‘incomprehensibly made man’. But it is the link between the Logos and Jesus which Gregersen tends to avoid. It may be hard to read the Gospels, especially John’s Gospel, in this way. The devil is in the detail, as it were. The Gospel opens with a Prologue singing the praises of a Logos who exists both in God, is the same as God, is all that Godself is, but is also separate from God, one with whom Godself is in conversation. The Prologue talks of the ministry of the Logos within creation, within the history of the created order, a life/ministry which the created order does not recognise – a ministry which resembles many of the stories of divine Wisdom. But that life/ministry changes with the phrase ὁ λογος σαρξ ἐγένετο (John 1.14) which, through the specific vocabulary of ἐγένετο signals a change in state of the Logos, a change into flesh – the shift from the descriptive use of the verb ‘to be’ in the opening verses, to the action verb of verse 14. The decision to ignore this shift of state, to eternalise it into God’s assumption of materiality into Godself, might be interpreted as excarnating Christ’s ministry – creating a virtual Christ whose ministry in Palestine is largely consequential, whose death on the cross means nothing, whose resurrection is without purpose. In such a Christology, the historic Jesus is disembodied, sublimated into the cosmic Christ. Moreover, the sheer genius of Jesus as the image of the invisible God is ignored and his exemplary role as the bearer of the image of God is shattered: his challenge to order, his inclusive love, his criticism of wealth, his love for the poor and the ordinary, his open commensality and call for reformation. Do we lose too much of Jesus’ materiality and the impact of God’s embodiment by our focus on the eternity of the Logos within the infinity concept of God? In one of the other contributions to Incarnation (Gegersern, 2015), Elisabeth Johnson argues that we do indeed lose too much of Jesus’ story by such a focus on the eternity of the Logos. Instead she asks whether Jesus’ incarnation, in all its frailty and ambiguity, in its ‘being-in-common’ not just with humanity but with all earthly/ cosmic life (her exegesis of ‘becoming “sarx”’ rather than “anthropos”), in his adoption of life at the very edge of existence, Jesus brings that awareness of our precarity, our thrownness into God’s own experience, into Godself and through that very ambiguity and precision, all flesh is recognised as holy and called into a ministry of creation care reflecting Jesus’ own ministry. Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 29 What has this to do with our discussion of digital being? All humans exist as enfleshed, embodied individuals embedded into the thrownness of our contextual reality. In this aspect, we share in the identity of Christ and, as such, Godself shares in our experience. God knows what it is to be human. But, like God, like the Logos enfleshed as/in Jesus, we are not limited to enfleshment, not limited to thrownness, for we also share in both self-understanding and in self-transcendence. Perhaps, this is what we mean by humanity bearing the image of God. Deep incarnation has the danger of running away from fleshy embodiment. While recognising the eternal impact of the incarnation, that Christ became what we are that we might become what he is. In other words, that incarnation was meant to change us, to reveal to us the nature of our own immanence within flesh, but also our own transcendence. This is what Elaine Graham picks this up in her discussion of Heidegger’s ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ that humans authentically ‘dwell’ when they ‘indwell’ their surroundings; when they actively, purposefully foster relationships with the rest of creation as ‘transcendent builders of worlds’. But embodiment and technological creativity, technological engagement remain together for Graham. Our being is intrinsically linked to our context – a truth we are beginning to attend to much more closely in a world beginning to decolonise. Our being is part and parcel of our interactions with and relationships with our own earth, and sky and gods and mortals. But those interactions, those relationships are part of the mediated construction of our own contextual reality which is part and parcel of our embodiment in media res amidst the techno-natural world increasingly a by-product of humanity’s use/adaptation of technology. Digital being is an embodied experience as much as any other expression of our thrownness into our context. As digitality encompasses us, enthralls us, so we are thrown into its embrace (Serrano and de Cesaris, 336). Of course, for those wary of technologies embrace, this will be an alien experience – part of Lagerkvist’s negative sense of thrownness which we might want to reject as unreal, gnostic, ‘other’. But we are called to be builders of new worlds, to transcend our fears, shape our worlds, refashion dust into stars. We may not have learnt how to be easily online yet – our precarity perhaps makes us doubt what’s real, whether even we are real. But Graham’s Heideggerian model of indwelling space by building new worlds suggests that it is Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 30 up to us to innovate within this new locale, this new place of being. The Church needs to embrace digital being, despite her sense of ‘thrownness’ – for that sense is part and parcel of who we are. Instead of rejecting our context and hiding in the cupboard, we need to embrace technology to engage with a technology-embracing, enfleshed and yet spiritual God who uses that very technology be it verbal, creative, creational, metaphysical to connect with us as embodied beings called to build new worlds into being. Or to use Elaine Graham’s recasting of Heidegger’s veneration of the fourfold (Geviert): to celebrate ‘the transcendent possibilities of the human creative imagination and its powers to remake the world, whilst exercising a realism and humility that flows from a mindfulness of our interdependence with our nonhuman Others’ (Graham, 235). Peter Phillips is Tutor in Theology at the Centre for Digital Theology, Spurgeon’s College, London. References Campbell, HA., 2004, ‘The Internet as Social-Spiritual Space’ in McKay, J., (ed.) Netting Citizens: Exploring Citizenship in the Internet Age, Edinburgh: St Andrews Press, pp.208–231. Campbell, HA. and Dyer, J., (ed.), 2020, Ecclesiology for a Digital Church, London: SCM Press. Crawford, K., 2021, Atlas of AI, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Dyer, J., 2022, From the Garden to the City: The Place of Technology in the Story of God, revised version, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications. Graham, E., 2009, ‘Being, Making and Imagining: Toward a Practical Theology of Technology’, in Culture and Religion, vol. 10.2, pp. 221– 236. Gregersen, N., 2010, ‘God, Matter and Information: Towards a Stoicizing Logos Christology’, in Davies, P. and Gregersen, N. (ed.), Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 319–348. Gregersen, N., 2015, ‘The Extended Body of Christ: Three Dimensions of Deep Incarnation’ in Gregersen, N. (ed.), Incarnation: On The Scope and Depth of Christology, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, pp. 225- 252. Crucible January 2023 Digital Being 31 Gregersen, N., 2016, ‘Deep Incarnation: From Deep History to PostAxial Religion’, HTS Theological Studies, vol 72.4, pp. 1–12. Hefner, P., 2003, Technology and Human Becoming, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Heidegger, M., 1962, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwells. Heidegger, M., 1977, The Question concerning Technology, and other essays, tr. W. Lovitt, London: Harper and Row. Heidegger, M., 1993, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Krell, DF. (ed.), Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, San Francisco: Harper & Row, pp. 343–64. Hutchings, T., 2017, Creating Church Online, London: Routledge. Johnson, E., 2015, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos: Soundings in Deep Christology’ in Gregersen, Incarnation, 2015, pp. 133–156. Kurlberg, J. et al. (ed.), forthcoming, Oxford Handbook to Digital Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kurlberg, J. and Phillips, P. (ed.), 2020, Missio Dei in the Digital Age, London: SCM Press. Lagerkvist, A., 2017, ‘Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness’, in New Media & Society, vol. 19(1), pp. 96–110. Markham, T., 2020, Digital Life, London: Polity Press. Phillips, P., 2020, ‘Enabling, Extending and Disrupting Religion in the Early COVID19 Crisis’ in Campbell, HA (ed.), The Distanced Church: Reflections on Doing Church Online, Digital Religion Publications: Oaktrust Library, pp. 71–74. Phillips, P., 2021, Bible, Digital Culture and Social Media, Abingdon: Taylor and Francis Group. Serrano, G. and de Cesaris, A., 2021, ‘Towards a Theological Anthropology of the Digital Age’, Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, vol. 7, pp. 335– 354