Envisioning a Post-humanist Body for the Church’s Digital Future—A Reflection from Post-Pandemic Hong Kong

Simon Shui-Man KWAN
Professor

Introduction

The Hong Kong government announced the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and lifted all related restrictions in March 2023. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, online religious activities were uncommon in Hong Kong. Despite the earlier expectation of returning to offline services post-pandemic, many churches have adopted a hybrid approach. A survey (2020b) by the Ray Bakke Centre for Urban Transformation in September 2020 showed that 71.9% of church leaders in Hong Kong planned to maintain hybrid services post-pandemic, and many have done so. The pandemic has spurred a shift to digital technology in religious practices globally, creating new digitally-mediated forms. Heidi Campbell and Troy Shepherd (2021) identified 10 critical trends for religious groups, including reconciling technology concerns with its benefits, the need for adaptability and innovation, and the continuation of digital innovations post-crisis. With the rise of generative AI in 2023, AI’s role in religious spheres is another emerging trend. In addition, the rapid advancement of VR and AR technologies would soon offer hyper-real experience of presence. This essay explores online worship and sacraments within digital religion and post-digital theology frameworks, proposing an ecclesiology that incorporates a post-humanist body concept for the church’s digital future. It challenges the virtual-real dichotomy, advocating for a view of embodiment that integrates humans and machines, relevant to the future digitally native Christian community. It aims to add a post-humanist dimension to the discourse on bodily presence in worship services, online and offline.

Digital Religion and Post-digital Theology

According to Maggi Savin-Baden (2022), post-digital theology examines the complex relationship between theology and digital technologies within a post-digital society. The “post-” prefix signifies moving beyond an initial fascination with the digital to critically analyzing the embeddedness of digital technologies within wider social contexts. Rather than merely exploring surface applications, post-digital theology recognizes the entanglement of the digital within cultures, institutions, politics, and society. Thus, it focuses on the interrelationship among humanity, technologies, and theologies, and examines how the digital interrupts and transforms traditional theology. In Savin-Baden’s terms, post-digital theology can be understood as mediation, investigating “the relationship between the digital and religious cultural practices” (ibid., 12). While different versions of post-digital theologies have distinct perspectives and focuses, they build on and overlap with the broader discourse of digital religion. Positioning post-digital theology as a “fifth wave” of research “characterized by studying religious beliefs and practices affected by, and entangled with, digital technologies” (ibid., 7), Savin-Baden argues that post-digital theology emerges from, yet moves beyond, the prior four waves of digital religion scholarship, briefly delineated below.

The scholarship on digital religion has steadily gained legitimacy over the past decades. Initial scholarly articles in the mid-1990s by Gregory Grieve, Stephen O’Leary, and Brenda Brasher documented groups bringing religious practices into new online spaces. These descriptive accounts often took an optimistic or pessimistic stance, framing the internet as either liberating or threatening religion. Terms like “cyber-religion” and “virtual religion” reflected perceptions of the internet as a separate space for experimental spirituality. According to Ruth Tsuria and Heidi Campbell (2022), the study of religion and the internet has progressed through several waves. The first wave in the 1990s was characterized by descriptive accounts documenting new online religious phenomena. Early scholarship speculated on the internet’s utopian or dystopian impacts on religion, though lacked empirical grounding. While technologically deterministic, the first wave provided an important starting point by identifying emerging cyber-religious practices. It mapped the digital religious landscape and paved the way for future research. Despite limitations, the first wave captured the wonder and anxieties of religion’s initial arrival online.

Emerging in the 2000s, the second wave focused on categorizing online religion. Scholars identified patterns and trends to classify digital religious expression. There was greater attention to how offline traditions shaped cyber-practices. Researchers moved away from technological determinism towards recognizing the ability and autonomy of users to make choices that shape their online interactions. Moreover, this wave began raising questions about the authenticity of digital practices (Campbell and Evolvi 2020, 6). It produced the first frameworks situating online religion within broader contexts.

Emerging in the late 2000s, the third “theoretical wave” focused on interpreting online religion through conceptual frameworks. It moved beyond description and taxonomy to theorize the cultural significance of digital religious practices. Key features include applying theoretical lenses to analyze online rituals, identities, and communities, examining the relationship between online and offline religion, emphasizing the two’s interconnectedness (Campbell and Evolvi 2020, 6). The third wave matured the field through robust theorization of the contexts shaping digital religion.

Emerging in the mid to late 2010s, the fourth “convergent wave” brings together previous approaches to develop holistic understandings of lived online religion. It draws on earlier mapping, taxonomy, and theorization to provide rich description of the everyday realities and details of digital religious practice as actively experienced. The focus is on how people embed technologies into their religious rituals, identities, communities, and negotiations with authority. Centering embodiment, experience, and existential, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions, scholars increasingly collaborate across disciplines and develop novel methodologies. An example is the concept of hypermediated religious spaces, which provides insights into how digital spaces contribute to negotiating religious and cultural identities and meanings, blurring boundaries between the real and imaginary (Evolvi 2019). As empirical depth converges with conceptual sophistication, the fourth wave represents the field’s maturation.

The fifth wave is still emerging, but appears to be defined by a focus on postdigital theology, interdisciplinary collaboration, new technologies and methods, and the exploration of tensions between innovation and traditional orthodoxy online. Building on previous research, the fifth wave seems concerned with creating space for practitioner voices and experiences within scholarship through digital theological reflections. While nascent, the fifth wave appears to be flourishing as scholars take advantage of previous research to pose new questions, frameworks, and methods. This next era is just beginning to investigate religion’s deeper imbrication in increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies amidst the tensions between online orthodoxy and liberation. The fifth wave represents the continued evolution of the field through interdisciplinary, methodological, and phenomenological expansion fueled by yet grappling with the digital revolution.

While initially framed as chronological waves, Tsuria and Campbell (2022, 10–11) remark that these research approaches may be better seen as co-existing typologies, especially as digital technologies become more interwoven with everyday life. This ensures the interdisciplinary study of religion and the internet remains vital for understanding contemporary religious phenomena. Key themes and inquiries shaping this field include adapting religious rituals to digital contexts and assessing the merits and trade-offs of such transitions. It also explores how religious identities are expressed and reshaped within online environments, along with their impact on self-understanding. Examining embodiment, interrogating real-imaginary or authenticity-virtual binaries, emergent forms of religious community through digital media and their relationship with traditional ones are ongoing concerns. In addition, it examines established religious authorities’ reactions to digital media, and the rise of new online religious leadership. Finally, it raises the issue of how religion should be re-defined (See Part 1 of Campbell and Tsuria 2022). Generative AI is certainly a topic of growing importance. All these themes form the basis for current post-digital theological critiques and constructions.

The Concerns for Embodiment and the Real/Authenticity

The preceding examination of the present condition of digital religion, in which postdigital theology is positioned within the most recent wave, discloses, among others, two enduring concerns widespread in the academic field and, certainly, in practical religious experiences as well, as religious activities transition online. These intertwined concerns cover the matter of embodiment versus disembodiment in digital religious practices, and the argument over the “realness/ authenticity” of online religious engagement. Furthermore, recent discussions have started to address the concept of space. Unlike Alexander Chow and Jonas Kurlberg’s (2020, 301, 313) tendency to see the two as separate issues, the following shows that, as indicated by discussions of online worship required by the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong, as in other places, these dual concerns of embodiment and authenticity are, in fact, deeply intertwined and mutually implied, rather than discrete, seen especially when the concept of space intervenes. I will argue that engaging these concerns necessitates discussing religion-going-online in a way that does not take digital technology just as tools for religious purposes, nor as a new communication method enabled by cyber-technology, but as an impetus to theologically reconceptualize the human body in light of posthumanism for ecclesiology in the new era. Let us turn immediately to a Hong Kong case to gain some insights into the issue.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings, many Hong Kong churches transitioned to online worship and even online Holy Communion, as they could not hold in-person services. As mentioned, this practice, mostly hybrid, continues in many churches post-pandemic. Online worship is not new globally. For some time, cyber-churches like the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life (https://slangcath.wordpress.com/) have conducted fully online worship in many countries. Some have even “closed down,” like Church of Fools, which became St Pixels, then the Ship of Fools site during the pandemic. Other examples are I.Church and similar churches/groups (see e.g. Hutchings 2017).

It might be expected that Hong Kong churchgoers who are analog natives, plus digital foreigners, immigrants, and the curious, would dislike online worship or Communion. However, a 2020 local survey (Ray Bakke Centre 2020a) of 2,151 people showed 26.2% would continue online worship if offered. Interestingly, percentages were similar across age groups, 18 to over 60. Additionally, 15.4% would join other churches’ online services. Taking the opportunity of preaching to a diverse array of congregations, varying in size and denomination, throughout 2023, I conducted unstructured interviews with church ministers from these respective traditions concerning this trend. Many of them confirmed more congregants than expected persisted in online worship, even post-pandemic. A good number saw this irritatingly as a subpar alternative not meeting scriptural requisites for authentic communal worship. However, church ministers must acknowledge, even if reluctantly, congregations soon becoming digital native—a trend found in Hong Kong, as well as in other places, although slightly more than 30% of the world population are still offline in 2003 (International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 2023). Hong Kong’s internet penetration hit 93.1% in 2023, with social media users at 89.9% of the population (Kemp and Kepios 2023). Hong Kong ranked highly digitally for decades, 7th globally and 2nd in developed Asia-Pacific already in 2002’s Digital Access Index (ITU 2003). This suggests most now under 21 are digital natives who may become church leaders within 10 years. This paper thinks ahead—if future churchgoers are mostly digital natives, how might the church understand cyber-worship? Here, I begin to use “cyber-worship” over “online worship” or “virtual worship” to explore how bodily presence could be renegotiated in cyberspace. The main ideas in this paper are thus crafted for the near-future church, not necessarily the present one.

A Debate

During lockdowns, many local ministers, as well as Christians, shared concerns about online worship, especially digitizing Holy Communion. Some queried the theology and validity of consecrating elements in church, then pastors delivering or congregants collecting them prior to communing together online Sunday. Others, avoiding network instability disrupting worship, eschewed live-streaming and instead uploaded pre-recorded YouTube videos, often with limited availability windows to encourage concurrent participation. In some cases where pre-recorded videos were used, ministers did not tell congregants the asynchronicity to preserve the sense of communal worship. They believed authentic presence, at least in the temporal sense, was essential when togetherness in the same physical space was impossible. All this shaped my initial impressions during the pandemic that many ministers worried about the theological validity and “realness” of cyber-participation in rituals, given the bodily absence of participants and lack of simultaneous participation.

Considering these impressions, and drawing from a literature search sourced from the ATLA database (spanning the period from 2020 to 2023 and utilizing keyword combinations including “bodily presence,” “embodiment,” “disembodiment,” “digital-/cyber-/online-worship,” “digital-/cyber-space,” and “realness/authenticity/virtual”), a set of provisional codes were generated. These codes were then employed to read a collection of pertinent materials, primarily comprising essays from the local Christian newspapers, the newsletters/ magazines of various seminaries in Hong Kong, relevant YouTube videos produced basically for Hong Kong browsers, pertinent Facebook posts, webpages of various local churches, as well as my fieldnotes stemming from chats with church ministers. Following the provisional coding method (Saldaña 2009, 120–23), the codes evolved through iterative processes and were continuously enriched and revised based on emerging data. Subsequently, a thematic analysis was conducted using the coded materials. The initial provisional codes include, for example, the role of the body in rituals (i.e., cyber-worship and Holy Communion), the significance of synchronicity in rituals, the importance of bodily presence in rituals, the theological integrity of rituals, and the components contributing to the realness/authenticity of rituals.

Due to space limits, this paper selectively focuses on key findings from the debate on cyber-worship sparked by Flow Church’s^[1] theological statement on online Communion in February 2020 (Flow Church 2020a). The debate includes diverse local perspectives on digitizing religious sacraments, serving the current purpose. The main points in the statement were:

• Precedents exist for online Communion—the United Methodist Church implemented it in 2013, and Catholic churches have online Eucharistic adoration.
• Online Communion involves members partaking of bread and wine at home together online.
• Sacraments signify God’s grace through physical symbols; Communion represents grace specifically.
• Online Communion constitutes a genuine, not “virtual,” sacrament with real elements.
• The Holy Spirit transcends space to unite believers across locations.
• What matters most is remembering Jesus through faith, not congregants’ physical presence. Faith resides in the heart and spirit, independent of space.
• Communion emphasizes togetherness but COVID prevents physical togetherness. However, online Communion allows unity despite physical separation, though in-person better actualizes “being together.”
• The Spirit unifies believers into one body despite dispersed locations.
• For full meaning, online Communion should occur live, not via replay, to retain synchronicity and togetherness.
• Two months later, in April 2020, the Hong Kong Catholic Diocesan Liturgy Commission issued instructions on online Mass, referencing the theology of Spiritual Communion. The key points were:
• With public Masses suspended, Spiritual Communion could be promoted to maintain believers’ bond with God and Church, especially when livestreaming allows synchronized prayer. Although Spiritual Communion remains feasible when watching recordings without synchronicity.
• Since God transcends time and space, fervent Spiritual Communion constitutes prayer anytime, anywhere.
• Viewing online Masses, meditating on scripture, praying devoutly, and Spiritual Communion can partially offset the lack of physical Mass attendance and Eucharist reception.
• Yet, while interrelated, physical participation in the Eucharist and Spiritual Communion differ substantially. Therefore, Spiritual Communion anticipates eventual offline Eucharist.

As seen above, one evangelical and one ecumenical statement accepted cyber-rituals amidst the pandemic’s prohibited physical presence, though with some reluctance. Certain pneumatologies and theology of grace provided justification, emphasizing “togetherness” and “synchronicity” as critical in defining rituals’ authenticity or optimal form.

However, opinions among Hong Kong Christians were diversified. For example, Andrew (2020), a Hong Konger, and a doctoral candidate in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow, argued from the consubstantiation stance that online Communion is inauthentic, opposing Flow Church. He argued the bread and wine consumed watching online Communion were neither Christ’s Body and Blood nor was there communion. Theologically, he contended Holy Communion involves three vital moments— offertory, consecration, and communion. Where there is no offertory, there could be no consecration, so no authentic communion. Since online Communion could only skip the moment of offertory, the bread and wine could not be consecrated as Christ’s Body and Blood. Without offertory and consecration, no communion occurs. Andrew’s view, particularly the conditions caused by congregants’ bodily absence rendering Communion inauthentic, matched the opinions of numerous ministers I interviewed.

Peter Li (2020), professor emeritus at Lutheran Theological Seminary, expounded on the Lutheran tradition of receiving the Holy Communion “in the Spirit” and arrived at a similar conclusion. He refuted Flow Church’s theological justification for the authenticity of online Communion, arguing that it relies merely on a memorialist view of the sacrament. Li emphasized that the Lutheran understanding of receiving Communion “in the Spirit” by faith, while a true spiritual reception, does not replace the necessity of partaking in the material bread and wine. This is rooted in the Lutheran understanding of sacraments as “means of grace”—physical channels instituted by Christ through which God imparts forgiveness and salvation. While online participation in the Eucharist allows for receiving Christ in Spirit through faith and partaking in the grace secured for us, it cannot replicate the full grace offered through the physical elements. Li argues that receiving Christ’s Body and Blood requires the sacrament to be administered physically. Nonetheless, he acknowledged Flow Church’s emphasis on “togetherness,” seeing it as implying their view of online Eucharist as theologically subordinate to in-person rites.

There are more nuances to the debate. An online symposium (Flow Church 2020b) featuring both theologians and ministers reveals richer details. Invoking the Jewish theology of sanctification of time, which forms the basis of the practice of keeping Sabbath holy and other important Jewish religious rituals, Lawrence Ko, a biblical scholar teaching at the Alliance Bible Seminary, pointed out that synchronization of ritualists’ participation in the ritual was necessary, saying that participation in rituals simultaneously and in the mode of physical togetherness in a Jewish ritual community were important for the diasporic Jews living in crisis to preserve their Jewish community identity. He further argued that when Jesus answered the Samaritan woman’s question regarding the place of worship, saying the hour is coming when worship will no longer be on Gerizim or in Jerusalem but in spirit and truth, “spirit” actually referred to the Holy Spirit, and believers can worship through the Holy Spirit without needing to be physically present at a location. Ko remarked that these ideas of synchronization have much implication for present-day discussions on the authenticity of online worship. For example, he said, since perfect synchronization is not affordable by live-streaming, online worship at most could only be taken as a suboptimal mode of worship, only to be seen as contingency measures, while only in-person worship is truly authentic. Slightly different, Rayson Tam, a pastor at a local megachurch called Evangelical Free Church of China Yan Fook Church, argued that “togetherness in the present moment” is an essential ingredient in the definition of authentic worship, contending that congregants need to be interacting as a community in real time, in the same physical space. Additionally, a senior pastor whom I interviewed, among many other interviewees, also stressed the importance of the practice of synchronicity, saying “being there in person is a must. But when we can’t, online works if everyone joins as one, true, congregation. It’s not only for identity building, but I believe the Bible commands us to worship together as one. Now we can’t be there, so we gotta worship God at the same moment.”

Underneath the Debate—Bodily Presence, Body, and Embodiment

Celine Yeung (2020), an assistant professor at the China Graduate School of Theology, rightly observed that churches of divergent theological traditions exhibit variance in their acceptance or rejection of online Eucharist and their modes of online worship. My empirically collected data also confirms this. However, the above findings reveal not only divergences, but, more critically, convergences. The central concerns relate to the authenticity of online worship and Communion, and the minimum requirements for a digitized ritual to be considered theologically valid, including aspects like togetherness and synchronicity. The different opinions converge at the level of a root assumption—whether digitization is accepted or rejected, or however the nuances of acceptance or rejection are articulated and explained, people presuppose, consciously or unconsciously, the congregants’ “presence” in cyberspace is essentially virtual, unreal, inauthentic, suboptimal, or downright an absence. The debate is not about the “absence” itself, but rather, it is about whether the absence of biological bodies in the physical space of rituals, and the asynchronic “presence,” is theologically acceptable for an authentic ritual; and if so, in what ways and to what extent. Intriguingly, the congregants’ very presence in cyberspace constitutes an absence. Regardless of how they are conducted, cyber-rituals are viewed as disembodied. Is there any room to presuppose alternatively?

If there is an alternative, I believe it is not about accepting “absence” itself. What is absent in cyber-rituals is nothing more than biological bodies of the congregants—the minds are there, the thoughts are there, the hearts are there, the voices are there, the gestures are there, even the “virtual” bodies are there, but only the biological bodies are not. Bodily presence is definitely essential to Christian rituals like worship, and particularly the Holy Communion. It seems natural to say that the absence of the biological bodies constitutes the disembodiment of cyber-rituals, which, if valid, seems theologically problematic. For example, while advocating for a good use of digital technology, Annette Potgieter (2020) insists that bodily presence must be regarded as essential in defining a church, based on theological and biblical reasons. Referring to the Pauline teachings, she insists that the church must be interpreted from a corporeal perspective, highlighting the need for Christians to align themselves with Christ, where the physical aspects of the alignment must be emphasized. Furthermore, Potgieter references the immanence of unity with Christ during the material participation of sacraments, emphasizing the corporeal nature of this unity. Potgieter is certainly not alone in insisting on the ecclesial significance of bodily presence. From a perspective of theological anthropology, Travis Pickell (2010) emphasizes the importance of the body by highlighting the significance of embodiment in theology. He discusses how the Bible celebrates embodiment, pointing out the centrality of physical healings, and Jesus sharing meals with those around him. Additionally, he underscores the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection, which confirm and heal all aspects of bodily nature, stressing the importance of the body to any theological anthropology. Furthermore, he discusses how Augustine’s understanding of the Christian doctrines of creation, the incarnation of Christ, and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body implies that the body has a high metaphysical status and is theologically an integral and permanent part of human being.

However, I argue that cyber-presence can be defended, and the absence of biological bodies justified, as a distinct mode of bodily presence in our digitally-shaped world. This argument necessitates a reconceptualization of what bodily presence could mean as we stand on the cusp of a deeply digital age.

First, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler (2021) argues that we should avoid a dichotomous distinction between “real” and “virtual,” because online actions within digital realms have continuously been debated regarding their authenticity compared to face-to-face interactions. She also notes that ritual studies emphasize different forms of embodiment, including physical, spiritual, and social embodiment, which implies one should not equate physical absence strictly with disembodiment. Furthermore, she points out that emergent forms of digital religious practices have started to approach reality differently, focusing more on the actors’ perspective and their criteria for evaluating “reality” and “virtuality.” Wendi Bellar and Campbell (2023) appear to concur with Kerstin’s latter point, stating that in the digital world, personal experiences often take precedence over official standards in judging ideas and practices as authentic. This phenomenon is termed “experiential authenticity,” describing how individuals determine if their religiosity online and offline are veridical. In a different approach, Anthony Le Duc (2022) renegotiates digitally mediated presence, positing that the term “virtual” can be problematic since it suggests a differentiation between physical presence and non-physical presence, with physical presence often perceived as more genuine. He argues that both forms of presence could lead to similar religious effects and serve analogous religious functions. However, he cautions that while online presence can be real presence, it remains important to distinguish between the two “realness.” These approaches— typifying, phenomenological, functional—are certainly insightful. However, in this postdigital era, a more radical reconceptualization may be warranted by obfuscating the demarcations between corporeality and cyberspace, through a posthumanist intervention.

Posthumanism Body, and Bodily Presence

In one way or another, postdigital theology embraces posthumanism, which is variously understood (Savin-Baden 2022). Not a few churches in the post-pandemic era seem to be echoing this postdigital trend. Evidence came from a study of 2,700 Midwestern US churches transitioning from offline to online worship during the pandemic revealed a growing conceptual shift in contemporary religious culture regarding popular views and language about technology (Campbell and Jones 2022). The study investigated how church leaders discussed and congregants experienced digital religious practices during the pandemic. It discovered that their framing of the church-technology relationship differed from pre-pandemic rhetoric. Two emerging rhetorical frames were identified—a “technology-cultured frame” and a “human-technology hybrid frame.” The latter echoes critical posthumanist claims, challenging anthropocentrism and praising technologically-mediated existence as empowering humans to reimagine body and embodiment. Specifically, it blurs bodily and cyber-presence boundaries. In sum, utilitarian technology embracement rhetorically opened posthumanist doors, challenging human-centered theological realities, although unintended. The study remarked that reflecting on technology’s role shows some discourses and languages affirm key premises of a prophesied posthuman reality, despite intentions.

Posthumanism focuses on how technology transforms and redefines the body and embodiment. It envisions a future in which human beings have transcended their biological boundaries through the integration of technology into their bodies and minds (Jorion 2022b). It thus questions the idea of the human as a unique and separate entity, and instead emphasizes the interconnections and interpenetrations between humans, animals, machines, and the environment, seeing human nature as a social construct that is constantly evolving and changing, stressing the plasticity of human bodies (Jorion 2022a). In fact, as early as 1985, in her seminal work, Donna Haraway’s (1985) conceptualization of the cyborg already rejected dichotomous framings of the relationship between the human body and technology. Raising the same question as Haraway did, namely, “why should our bodies end at the skin?” Hélène Jeannin (2022) offers an interesting analysis on modern body modification technologies. Practices once marginalized are now mainstream, showcasing how cybernetic thinking advocates for and realizes the body as a malleable and porous construction. Through various examples of such technologies, Jeannin contends that cyborgs are becoming real, with devices embedded in bodies. Skin-based technologies have rendered the skin not as what distinguishes the body from its environment, but only as a dynamic interface. Technology alters bodies and changes what it means to be human. In the past, the boundary of the body, and subject as well, was confined to the limits of the flesh; however, this concept is now being increasingly questioned by the emergence of digital technology and practices.

This worldview, growing in the post-pandemic era, especially among digital natives, can be understood in terms of trans-corporeality, which is a posthumanist mode of new materialism, meaning that “all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them” (Alaimo 2018, 435). This development carries significant implications for the renegotiation of the relationship between embodiment and cyberspace. Julie Cohen (2007; 2012) presents a nuanced view of cyberspace, challenging the metaphorical usage that implies it is a disembodied and separate entity from the physical world. She articulates that cyberspace is an integral extension and evolution of our spatial experiences, contending that it should not be conceptualized in terms of abstract, Cartesian space, but rather as a domain characterized by experienced spatiality. Cohen argues that our engagement with cyberspace is fundamentally mediated by our embodied human cognition, meaning that our interactions within this digital environment are deeply rooted in our physical senses and perceptions. By critiquing the notion of cyberspace as virtual, as detached from the real, Cohen posits that it is, in fact, part of lived space, dynamically shaped by the interactions of biologically embodied beings. She asserts that cognitive theory reinforces the perspective that cyberspace is relative, mutable, and continuously constituted through our embodied practices. Thus, cyberspace is intricately connected to and interacts with our sensory and cognitive functions, thus forming a multifaceted matrix that includes both the digital and the biological body.

Various versions of posthumanism aligned with new materialism go further than what is said above in their advancement of the conceptualization of everything, including digital and biological bodies, as material things that are alive, relational, and imbued with agency. This relational ontology, brought into mainstream contemporary philosophical thought by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), refers to the notion that bodies come into being only through relations and associations with other human and non-human entities in temporary assemblages. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal apparatuses … and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning … We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage” (1987, 36). This ongoing process of ontological becoming has led scholars like Jan Bennet (2010, 23–35) to apply theories of assemblage in reconceptualizing the bodily subject as a human-nonhuman assemblage. The posthumanist conception of the body is thoroughly non-anthropocentric; as Braun (2004) notes, “Deleuze’s bodies are multiple. They are not simply ‘human’ bodies. More important, the human body is not, never was, and never can be, simply ‘itself’” (272). In this framework, the body relates and becomes a body through relationality. The body and cyberspace can thus be viewed as forming an assemblage, an ad hoc body ever in flux. This means the physical body and digital realm of cyberspace are so interconnected that they create a single, constantly changing entity, rendering a dichotomous understanding of the two obsolete. As such, posthumanism positions the body as an entity reformulated through its contextual relations, advancing a conception of embodiment that focuses not on what a body essentially “is” but on what it can do through assemblages. This approach to the body encompasses a broader sense of corporeality that includes digital and biological aspects.

Concluding Remarks

I believe that this renewed conception of the body exists not only in theory but also in practice, especially among digital natives. Many have noted that for digital natives, the understanding and experience of what the body refers to have already undergone a paradigm shift—one that is fierce and irreversible. With the emergence of “virtual” violence, “virtual” sex, “virtual” rape, etc., people are beginning to realize that the experience of cyberspace cannot be separated from the biological body. To put it bluntly, cyberspace is actually entangled with the biological body. Imagine the possibilities: the high-speed, low-latency, wide-area connectivity of upcoming internet technology will allow a surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere to operate on a patient in the Southern Hemisphere, removing a tumor with instruments guided from afar. In these instances, cyberspace becomes an extension of the surgeon’s hands. Likewise, as technologies like the Internet of Things and autopilot mature, cyberspace will become the hyper-real hands and feet of the driver. Furthermore, when controllable interactive holographic projection or volumetric display technology become widespread and mature, our “bodies” at home can also be simultaneously “present” at a meeting venue, and what our eyes, ears, mouth and nose perceive will be even more real, perfect, and on-site than what our biological bodies experience. With VR and AR technologies maturing, and SpaceX’s Starlink program looking likely to succeed, we may set foot on Mars!

To give a more relatable example—during the peak of the pandemic, everyone was confined at home. For us analog natives, digital immigrants and the digital curious, we complained endlessly, longing to be able to go out and meet up with friends. My then 18-year-old son, however, was immersed in cyberspace—after Zoom classes, he would team up with friends from different parts of the world, fighting war games, perfectly content without any felt need to go out; because he was already “out.” Is he socially withdrawn? He actually has a wider social circle than many who are not digital natives, and is very “close” with friends from South Africa and Japan whom he has never “physically” met before. He does not consider friends he has never met in person to be “physically” distant strangers, a perspective easily grasped by digital natives but often puzzling to those who came of age before the internet.

If the body is cyberspace and cyberspace is the body, then cyber-presence (or telepresence or even Embodied Telepresence) and what we have grown accustomed to thinking of as bodily presence no longer bear any essential differences; the differences are only surface deep, and socially constructed. Thus, the virtual and physical realms, as traditionally conceptualized, are not fundamentally distinct—the new “body” has emerged.

As a concluding remark, I posit the following questions: If future congregants consist primarily of digital natives, will their understanding and experience of the body diverge from our own in the present day? If bodily presence constitutes a fundamental building block of the church, as said above, and our understanding and experience of the body undergoes profound transformations as elucidated above, will our ecclesiology similarly evolve, and if so, how? If our conceptions of the body and thus the church are indeed destined to change so dramatically, how might we embrace this impending shift today? Should we defend the old world or re-envision our church ministry as well as our ecclesiology even now through the lens of this prospective context? In envisioning a posthumanist body for the church’s digital future, we may take more seriously what Ella Brian (2011) has asserted, “if Deleuze has anything to teach us about ‘virtual’ bodies, it is that they have never been virtual, if by virtual we mean non-material” (139).

References