Matter and Spirit: Holy Spirit and Eschatology for a Digital Age. Theological Ruminations1 Andy Draycott PhD Assistant Professor of Theology Talbot School of Theology, Biola University Prompting Questions: How does the Digital Age complicate Art and Belief? How does a Digital Age call into question our conceptions of Matter and Spirit? How do Matter and Spirit call into question our orientation to a Digital Age? Loss of Control or Missionary Vulnerability
The explosion of digitally available information complicates the task of Christian believing. The Christian confession is given up to search engines and blogposting; Wikipedia generates student theology papers - all sundered from the embodied worship of a living church’s discipleship in missionary witness. This is true…..yet….so far, so luddite…
As a word of self-awareness, the digital age, of course, poses a threat to the preacher / theologian’s control of the words cast out broadly about and as the Word of God. But it is not as if that supposed control could ever be other than a superficial, self-congratulatory illusion, an idolatry of orthodoxy:
a virtual reality of the worst kind – fostering utopian superficialities or fire-wall
protected ‘worlds of truth’ impervious to the world that God loves, except through the right kind of social belonging (or perhaps a wardrobe?).
These are ruminations rather than an essay. That is mostly a claim about composition. I wrote meditatively, and only afterwards have gone back and sought to allocate references to the primary Christian language from Scripture, and acknowledge intellectual debts where possible. Uglier, but honest. 1
However, orthodoxy – right believing – is fostered not by control but by freedom for obedience to a life lived along a certain Way2 - a narrow Way at that, not broadband access3.
But just to the extent that Christians have always sought to live that Way as a sharing with the world, so that same out of control broadcast and vulnerable communication, perhaps most naturally resented in the Digital Age, has in fact always hallowed and haunted a missionary church, proclaiming, portraying, establishing and publishing orthodoxy in accordance with the mobile, translatable, e-readable Scriptures.
Profligacy of the Holy Spirit: humane vulnerability vs Gnostic technique
Such profligacy of communication is, after all, the province of the work of the Holy Spirit preceding and driving and sustaining the church’s missionary proclamation of the Kingdom of God.4 The vulnerability and openness engendered by the Spirit is eschatological rather than out of controlical5. It is mercifully and messily creaturely - materially employing human tongues and ears, hands and eyes in service of the Kingdom of heaven at hand6.
Humanely so, rather than
humanistically efficient. This Holy Spirit’s kingdom work is not about making optimal use of marketing for the quick conversion sell, or the devising of best strategy for communicative goals aimed at the minds of a niche clientele7. It is not driven by web site hits, tweet traffic or facebook
Acts 9:2. Matthew 7:14. 4 John 3: 5-8, Matthew 12:28. 5 I was teaching a seminar on Stanley Hauerwas as I pondered, and his Peacable Kingdom, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983, must be an influence here. 6 Matthew 10:20, 4:17. 7 I want to acknowledge the influence of Bernd Wannenwetsch’s emphasis on the Spirit that has shaped my thinking, see broadly Political Worship. Ethics for Christian Citizens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, and more particularly on this 2 3
friends.
When that much becomes all that – when the media cease to mediate but instead
monopolize – we are surely surfing toward gnosticism, a denial of the abundance and goodness of pluriform materiality by technical means.
Art that recognizes this Christian vulnerability in the world will suffer its measure of being illegally photographed, copied, forged, stolen, and copylifted against copyright. There can be no security agenda for Art or Belief. That is their penultimate destiny, now enhanced digitally8. So far, so problematic…
Yet in spite of this, Art allows and enjoys the spiritual transcendence of place that its physical production otherwise experiences as limit. Yes, that spiritual transcendence is the same mode of Art’s subjection to popular piracy over the interwaves of digital access, copied and pasted into so many power points and syllabi9. Nevertheless, an act of human artistic creation so orders and transfigures matter so as to evoke the moral connectivity of creaturely life10, whether by representation, abstraction, pastiche or conceptualization - in small or grand scale - to rapturous, puzzled or indignant reception - at hand or from afar. The spiritual transcendence of viewing, hearing, taking in and recollecting, remembering and taking away, elsewhere - the Digital Age opens that sharing and communication as invitation to participation to many, not as a threat, but as a possibility of virtual moral presence in absence that testifies to human creaturely longing and belonging. point, ‘Inwardness and Commodification: How Romanticist Hermenuetics Prepared the Way for the Culture of Managerialism – a Theological Analysis’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 21.1, April 2008. 8 For ‘penultimacy’ see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Ultimate and Penultiamte Things’ in Ethics, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995, pp. 146-170. 9 Mea Culpa. 10 Comments about moral relation in creation order, pluriformity and redemption are learned from Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, Leicester: Apollos, 1994; community and communication of goods from his Common Objects of Love, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002 and The Ways of Judgment, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.
Bless Holy Spirit. Come Lord Jesus.
In Christ by the Holy Spirit : presence in absence
Meditating on the Spirit transforms initial concern about the Digital Age into openness. It is in the Spirit that Christians find themselves bound in Christ across the sway of worldwide and centuries’ wide Christianity, that is if we are to have the unity of the mind of Christ at all11. Still more, it is then in the Spirit that Christians understand their fellowship as one body in Christ12. The Spirit brings Jesus’ absence as presence13. And as the Spirit leads Christians into the truth of Scripture that virtual presence in absence of brothers and sisters in Christ pre-empts the technological pluralization of presence in absence - the downloaded, gone viral image or song or video in the digital age - by virtual participation in reality beyond geographical confines.
In Christ by the Holy Spirit: eschatological patience vs instant download
Meditation on the Spirit also makes the theologian take issue with too portentous a reading of the significance of the Digital Age. However technically transformative a digital revolution may be, the Christian believer confesses that the age that matters is this: the age of the last days14 inaugurated in Jesus’ presence in Kingdom bringing life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension, and presence in absence in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Philippians 2:1. 1 Corinthians 12. 13 Matthew 28:20, John 14. 14 Hebrews 1:2, Acts 2:17. 11 12
Art and Belief in the light of the Spirit, whose virtual reality, that is in the virtue or power of Christ15, sustains Christian confession16, is oriented to the culmination of these last days and the Lord’s return - Art and Belief together await eschatological reconciliation. There is now a perpetual deferral of fulfillment wherein the Spirit as down-payment17 sustains a life of patient and joyful waiting18 that takes the form of belonging in the world as both pilgrim19 and citizens20: a pneumademocracy21.
Eschatological pneumademocracy: pluriformity of Matter and Art’s moral praise
That pneumademocratic character of Christian churchly existence prompts the artist to engage the conception, production, construction, publication, and sharing of the concrete yet also digital work expansively as a participation, not so much in the Digital Age as such, although its technology will aid as much as it frustrates, but rather as participation in the eschatological age where the Spirit teaches us to holds things in common22.
Things – by which I mean, matter. Matter’s very pluriformity, as things and not just thing, is taken up and blessed by the Spirit’s adoption of the diversity of Christians into the life of the church and Israel in the Christ23. There is no getting around the materiality of that particular story. And if the
Christopher Morse, ‘The Virtue of Heaven: From Calvin to Cyber-talk and Back’, Modern Theology, Vol. 19, No. 3, July 2003, pp. 317-328; see also his excellent The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News, London, T & T Clark, 2010. 16 1 Corinthians 12:3. 17 Ephesians 1:14-15. 18 2 Peter 3:12. 19 1 Peter 2:11. 20 Philippians 1:27, 3:20. 21 Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, ‘Paul and the Politics of Interpretation’, in Richard Horsley (ed.) Paul and Politics, Harrisburg, Trinity Press, 2000, pp. 40-57. 22 Acts 2. 23 Romans 8-12, 8:23. 15
stones would cry out the praise of the Savior24 and the rivers and the trees of the field clap their hands25 they do not do so separately and individualistically but as the corporate praise-in-groaning of creation, material order, in moral suffering toward the glory of the sons of God26. Much as belief participates in that moral suffering in the crucible of unbelief.
Moral, that is, in virtue of
interconnectedness, still yet under the curse of the Fall - in anticipation of the restoration of true relations in a new heaven and new earth. Art is an unquantifiable part of that corporate living of human creatures amidst creation toward their Creator’s loving destiny.
It is the morality inherent in that interrelatedness that has us clinging tenaciously to the goodness of creation27. Matter, in the age of mission, digitally or otherwise, awaits the hope of creation’s redemption given back to it already in Christ’s resurrection and ascension body28. Art in a digital age cannot abandon that moral vindication. Just so it explores the depths of the contours of the age, sometimes in the shape of the tragic, yet only penultimate, virtual yet no less real, truth of ugliness, banality, sin, immorality and evil. Just so it delights in the grand and the beautiful, in the small and insignificant, the uncommissioned, the unwieldy, the unrecognized or unappreciated, the website of few hits, that nonetheless participate in that eschatological waiting. Art will thrive in its elite settings subversively, much as theology must in a university, for the Spirit who reminds of truth and convicts of sin29, maps the moral orientation of new creation as a subversion of elitism that has no eschatological future30. The kings of the nations are forever bringing the glory of the nations into
Luke 20:40. Psalm 98:8, Isaiah 55:12 26 Romans 8:19-21. 27 Genesis 1, Hebrews 11: 3, also see accompanying essay by Erica Grimm Vance, ‘Matter and Spirit: Creation and Incarnation’. 28 Colossians 1:15-20. 29 John 16. 30 James 2, 2 Corinthians 5:17, precisely of interest as elitism and factionalism plagues the church in Corinth. 24 25
the heavenly city31. The abundance of that glory testifies to the power of the redemptive work of new creation as new creation. At one word all things are made new. The pluriformity of creation in which Belief and Art participate is transformed but not dissolved into uniformity.32
Eschatological overcoming of the Digital Age
The immediate presence of the Triune God to his restored creation in the heavenly city come down to earth is the end of the presence in absence of the Digital Age33. The translocality of Art and Belief, even in a Digital Age, is no grand prophetic representation of that future reality. The present age does not possess within its technological grasp the trigger for the coming of the Kingdom in fullness. Yet by God’s grace his Kingdom will come, just as the Son has taught us to pray translocally in the Spirit in the Kingdom at hand34. In fullness there is no more deferral, no more waiting. Faith becomes sight35, we see face to face36. A Digital Age is a passing age in which the Christian is called to live the life, in the church for the world, of joy and patience, sharing not hoarding, through corporate hope and individual vocation in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Bless Holy Spirit. Come Lord Jesus.
(ↄ)Andy Draycott. 2011. Permission is given to reproduce, distribute and extract from this article. Acknowledgement would be appreciated.
Revelation 21:24-26. 2 Corinthians 3:17-18. 33 Revelation 21-22. 34 Matthew 6:9-13. 35 Hebrews 11-12. 36 1 Corinthians 13:12. 31 32