Are We Disembodied and Digitized by Meeting Online?

Steve responded to my previous post. I appreciate the discussion. It’s good for people to think through this new territory and I understand the suspicion toward what is completely new. We should be suspicious. We should ask, Why is this new thing presented to us? Is it harmful or helpful?

“But is online media a permanent alternative to corporate worship? Is that what's meant by corporate worship?”

No. I’ve tried to make this clear. The ideal is to be physically present with one another, but such is not the ideal because it is somehow more obedient to meet physically than meeting online in a time when the risk of physically meeting is assessed to be a greater threat than not meeting physically. It is ideal because it provides a basic human component to human health, as Steve mentions below. But this is a basic human need that all humans, believer or unbeliever, have. I just believe it should be primarily met with other believers when possible. So if the church can meet physically in the same place without this threat, it should. Furthermore, when the church does again meet physically, anyone not doing so would be in sin, since they are not in submission to the elders nor partaking in a church that is meeting in all of the aspects of ministry I mentioned before. Along those same lines, watching Youtube videos or listening to podcasts alone is not meeting as the church online. Fellowship and all it assumes, the meeting of needs, spiritual and physical, must remain as essential components of the assembly.

i)                    I haven't referred to the sacraments or sacramental grace. I'm Zwinglian. I haven't suggested that physicality is sacramental. 

Steve hasn’t referred to it with the word “sacrament.” That is true. However, when he speaks as though there is something supernatural or mystical happening due to our physical presence in the same place, as though a grace, a transformation, or a power is given to us through it, then this is, in fact, a sacramental idea. It isn’t biblical, but you can see how tradition has shaped our thinking, even if subconsciously. We think there is something mystical happening when we physically meet in the same place. But what does physically meeting in the same place do that meeting through some other means not do?

Now, I would argue for the sacramental nature of the assembly as God’s temple, but as argued before, this is not limited by what geographical area we occupy. The church is the temple when they do not meet. The temple is enlarged when they do meet so that sacred space is enlarged to a greater geographical area. God’s life-giving glory/presence occupies and flows from sacred space. This is only magnified when meeting online, not diminished.

ii)                  However, human beings aren't angels. We're embodied agents, Embodied souls. Even the intermediate state is a temporary stopgap.

Two things here. 1. Steve seems to be suggesting that we are becoming digitized ourselves, disembodied. We aren’t living in the Matrix. Everyone online is still embodied. Everyone meeting is still physical. I don’t how physical church gets for people, but I’ve never heard anyone make the argument that you did not go to church unless you physically touched someone. So what exactly does disembodied worship/fellowship look like? Have we been practicing it even when we do physically meet in the same room? Our physical brains engaged, our physical mouths take communion, our physical vocal chords sing, our physical tongues speak the truth. I’m one of the biggest adversaries toward gnostic thinking in our culture that I know of, but online worship is very physical and hardly disembodied.

2. The problem with this line of argumentation is that it will eventually have to argue that Christ can’t join us in our worship/fellowship in the way that He should because He is not meeting with us physically but through the Spirit. Likewise, those in heaven can have no real worship and fellowship with Christ because they are spirits and disembodied at the moment. If embodied worship is a necessity, then they all are deficient in it.

We are physical beings by design. Physical interaction is natural component of corporate worship. In person fellowship. The role of touch in human relations. Face-to-face conversation. Singing together. Praying to gather.

What does “physical interaction” mean? I agree that what is devoid of technology is natural, but confusing what is natural with what is ultimately good or ideal has implications on numerous things. If Christians must shun technology for the natural as an ethical good then we must all reconsider becoming Amish. What is natural is normative by necessity in a non-technical age, not something that is ideal. I see no biblical argument in suggesting otherwise. We sing together, have face-to-face interactions with one another online, so the only thing missing is physical touch. Is that actually necessary for fellowship? Have you not fellowshipped or gone to church until you physically touch someone? Does that mean that men should never fellowship or worship with women? Certainly, in church history, unmarried men and women did not touch one another in the assembly. I’m not sure that even married people did so. Does this mean they were all out of fellowship and had forsaken the assembly? Is it necessary to just touch one person or all of them? All joking aside, touch is a part of a physical need that Christians can provide for one another and should when they are able. It is not a necessary component of fellowship and worship though. If you are a leper, and it's not Jesus or an apostle with a healing gift you're reaching out for, please love people and keep your hands to yourself.

iii)                It's not necessarily about meeting in the same room, but meeting together. Weather permitting, it could be an out-door event, although buildings provide shelter from the inclement elements.

iv)                By Hodge's logic, to assemble in public worship was never a normative feature of Christian (or Jewish?) worship? There's no obligation or necessity for Christians to ever meet together in physical worship. There are no supernatural blessings that God reserves for public worship. It could all be cubical and disembodied. 

That’s really not my argument at all. It was normative because it was the only way a church could meet together. Now that isn’t the case. If by “normative,” Steve means “an essential component of the command” then my entire post refuted that idea. If it was normative then none of these things could be done by proxy, and they were even in the early church. This is a new technology which allows for it in our day, which is really why what I am saying is so shocking to people. It simply is unfamiliar, and therefore, uncomfortable, not disobedient. It certainly is not ideal because we should want to be with one another in order to meet one another’s needs concerning physical interaction, but my argument is that this is not a necessary component of the believer’s ministry to one another. Other humans can fill it, but believers can only fulfill the ministries to one another the Lord has assigned to them and them alone. There is a longing to be with the people that you love in every way that you can. We long to be in the physical presence of Jesus, and as Paul says, we are absent from Him right now. That is the ideal that we would try and fulfill while being obedient in any way that we can. But that phrase “while being obedient” is important. We don’t off ourselves to be present with Christ. Hence, we need to ask whether we are doing what is right and most loving first and then ask if there is more that we can do to be present with Christ and one another in our love and obedience.

There are situations where representatives communicated through letter rather than in person. In some cases that's a practical necessity. And it can have the advantage of a permanent verbal record for posterity. But worship and instruction of distinct, if often related. 

Instruction in a letter is not distinct from the instruction in the assembly. They assembly was instructed by the letter. Paul taught the Corinthian congregation through letter and was there in spirit with them through it. It is one and the same in that regard. Corporate worship requires the assembly to meet together and receive that instruction though. I never argued otherwise. That is accomplished both through physically meeting and meeting online.

v)                  Hodge has an oddly ghostly view of Christian worship, as if embodied agency is generally expendable or superfluous. Simulated physical fellowship. Spectral worship. Digitized communion. 

Maybe I have an oddly Holy Ghostly view. LOL. Here we see again this idea that if one is communicating through video he is somehow disembodied. Does everyone who speaks to someone through a camera go out of their bodies? Is Steven suggesting again that some mystical thing happens through the physical body being present in the same geographical location with other physical bodies? Certainly, chemical things happen. This is why people like going to places where there are lots of other people. It’s why they like visiting friends and family. There is something very natural that happens, but I don’t see anything supernatural  about it that only believers can fill.

Again, is the communion digitized? Are we all eating gigabytes? No. We’re all eating physical bread and drinking physical wine while we meet and see one another’s faces as an elder conducts the communion ceremony. It remains a very physical thing we are doing with our physical bodies. We are all still connected because of the digital media. We are not digital nor is our partaking in the body and the blood. Furthermore, worship is in spirit and truth, not physical presence, as Jesus instructed the woman at the well. Isn’t all worship “spectral worship”? Isn’t it all the Holy Spirit working with our inner beings, our spirits, since the body right now is dead in sin? Certainly, worship is performed with our bodies, but this isn’t different when meeting online. As I said, we are still doing everything in our bodies, singing with our physical vocal chords, eating the bread and wine with our mouths, speaking the truth in love with our tongues, etc. Preaching has always been non-physical. The non-physical word is the medium through which we worship God and are transformed as His church. Whether digitized or in person, the Word is used by the Spirit to transform the physical temple of the church on earth by their hearing it and receiving faith and grace through it. This is all accomplished through an online meeting.

Indefinite lockdowns will cause churches to go broke. They will never reopen. Moreover, Tech Giants are cracking down on the electronic church.

Sure, but my argument wasn’t about the economics of the localized church either. It was solely about whether believers are being obedient to their ministry by meeting online in order to protect the church’s members from plague. Whether a local church has enough money should not be brought into the ethical equation until the money is the ethical question itself. Certainly, if the spiritual risk outweighed the physical risk, then the physical risk would have to take a backseat. But Steve’s statement confuses what I am arguing. I am not arguing anything about the larger economy, even though the larger economy certainly will affect the church’s finances. I am arguing about whether we further a risk to members because we believe it a necessity to ministry to physically meet in the same place (we are meeting in the same places online, but are not in the same geographical area). The risk to church finances is related to another question concerning the risk assessment of going to work versus staying at home. I have not addressed that question.

Expert opinion isn't monolithic. At the same time, expert opinion can become insular and ingrown.

I never suggested expert opinion was monolithic, but the people equipped to disagree with experts are other experts, not some armchair experts who read a bunch of articles on the internet and watched Youtube videos that are contrarian to expert opinions. It reminds me of the documentaries about the exodus and Jesus that were done by Simcha Jacobovici. Lots of data without the ability to understand it that comes with being in the fields of study he attempts to use in his arguments. This happens in every field.

I don trust "experts" on the co-ed military or indoctrinating students about trangenderism or obliterating the distinction between boys teams and girls teams. I don't delegate that to the "experts". Credulity is not intellectual or theological virtue for Christians to cultivate. That's not something we're entitled to delegate to unaccountable experts driven by a secular social agenda. 

I actually do trust experts on all of these things because the experts are the orthodox teachers of the church using the Bible to assess ethics. All of these issues are ethical issues and in the realm of ecclesiastical authority. The secular state has no authority or expertise on these issues at all. So these are not good examples. In this case, we’re the experts the secularists aren’t trusting, which makes them just as much fools, if not more so, as we are when we do not trust them in their actual fields of expertise God has given over to them.