I’ve read Joshua Moritz’s take on the emerging church. Moritz paints, I think, a fair picture of the emerging church, and even defends in against critiques like Carson’s. For an article in a theological journal, it refrains from judging the movement from a checklist of criteria about what is good church and what is not, and seeks to gain an understanding of the worldview its members may have (though mentions Brian McLaren a little bit too much to make me think he knows any other emerging church “leaders”) and bring to the contemporary faith question.
But Moritz does offer a criticism of the emerging church that I would like to comment on. He asserts that while the emerging church rhetoric seems against systematic theology, it falls into the trappings of the discipline in its conversations:
It would seem that the vast majority of Emerging thinkers who reject systematic theology are faced with the same conundrum, in that every in-house Emerging discussion over theological matters that I have witnessed so far – be it in books, on blogs, in sermons or in lectures – has transpired predominantly via prose. In this way Emergents make constant use of the language and categories of systematic theology while at the same time denying its legitimacy and denouncing it as irredeemably modern. If one it to take seriously the Emerging Church’s focus on praxis informing theology, I would ask why this should be the one exception. [...]
[...] If we cannot speak of God how can we assert so confidently that none of our categories apply to God? I fear that some Emergents might be wandering down the road of Nominalism while insisting they are Critical Realists. The rejection of modernism notwithstanding, theological and philosophical incoherency is still not a virtue – even among the most hard-lined postmodernist philosophers. (p. 33)
I have to hand it to Moritz – it is a fair observation. Emerging church blogs (for example) do tend at time to delve into sophisticated diatribes about many issues that a large number of us would fine academic and perhaps inaccessible. However, though a fair observation, it doesn’t make it a worthy criticism of the emerging church at large.
Firstly, his knowledge of emerging church thinking is limited to “books, blogs, in sermons or in lectures” where he sees discourses akin to the systematic theology we find in bible college. Well, d’uh. If you’re going to look at books, lectures, sermons and even blogs, you’re going to get that kind of prose. It’s the nature of writing. Writing is linear, logical, rational and propositional. emerging church writers are going to write like a systematic theologian, because they’re writing for an audience that wants to consider emerging church theology by reading. If Moritz wanted a statement of emerging church theology by listening to music or visiting an art installation or mission project then he would read something altogether different.
Secondly, I think the emerging church, by and large, is not biased against systematic theology as much as it has reservations about the place of systematic theology in the contemporary church. As Mary Hess puts it well, “systematic theology leaves people out of the conversation” and its the systematic theology conversation that bears its great weight in thinking and talking about God in the church. For “Emergents” (Moritz’s term, not mine), systematic theology may inform the church’s present and future, but it does not make systematic theologians the church experts, the first go-to for advice and decision-making. If other media can carry other types of thinking about God and church and discipleship and faith and etc then “Emergents” will embrace them, in order to listen out for other voices and bring them to the conversation.
What do you reckon?
In January I wrote a series of posts on this blog (beginning with this one) where I spouted the term “Cyborg” around quite free of care. I used it as merely a metaphor for human relationships to the Internet, in particular online religion, in relation to the assumptions and foci of those who research online religion. In these posts I did not pretend that understandings of this metaphor was the best or only way to understand the progression of that research progression, nor did I pretend that the posts offered a comprehensive overview of the use of the term. Indeed, there are many ways to talk about the Cyborg, in fantasy and in reality.
AI, Johnny Mnemonic, The Bionic Woman, Metropolis, The Animatrix, Terminator, and even Inspector Gadget offered us glimpses of the possible futures either where machines become human or parts of our original humanity is replaced or enhanced by machines. Even the Alien series of films, which is primarily about biological monsters, has running throughout a subplot beginning with an android whose amoral loyalty to government leads him to betray the protagonist and ends with an android whose “programming” leads her to betray her creators in order to save the protagonist. Our journalists promote the notion that life imitates art in their retelling of stories of people who replace artificial eyes with video cameras, prosthetic fingers with USB flash drives, and the instalment of bionic devices to not just overcome disability, but enhance performance. We have painted our popular culture with images of victorious humans who have used technology to conquer the human condition and of a further fallen humanity at the mercy of machines around and inside them.
For Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis, the Cyborgs created in these stories are not just science fiction versions of gods and monsters, for they are also heroes and villains. They are “narrative figures who are helping us to thicken the plots we are weaving with very real, and very spunky, technologies” (p. 189). We add story, values, beliefs around technology because that’s what humans do to all things: we add meaning to things in order to know what to do with and around them. Our stories around machines are rich because we are aware of how much we have achieved alongside them, and how much we don’t yet know we can do with them. Indeed, the popularity of Tamagotchis in the previous decade was not just because children wanted to play pet-owner with a primitive picture of an AI animal (prompting so much moral panic about the future of owning and loving a flesh-and-bone pet), but because children know their future will be surrounded by machines with whom they will relate on not just practical levels, but emotional ones too, seeing how their parents “love and hate” their computers, televisions and mobile phones.
In my thesis I spend some time talking about how the history of Internet technology is laden with values that mean the Internet is socially constructed, and there is a religious element to this too. From its birth in military laboratories, through its release to academic institutions and hacker students, to its introduction to the general market, the Internet carries tags of freedom, intimacy, democracy, secrecy, isolation and domination. These values guide our approach to the technology and our relationships to others through it. Religious constructions include the notion that cyberspace is a realm outside the material world, free from material constraints of time, space and power, and the potential for a more just society and fuller existence. Religion can also label the Internet as a demonising and diabolical force, tempting people away from real relationships and stable communities.
These values are also formed in the context of production and consumption of all technologies, in a period where the more advanced the device, the more “like us” it is made and sold. Computers become personal computers become desktops, that we use by opening windows and clicking images, navigating it in the way we would a house, getting to know it as if it were another person. The mobile phone becomes the personal digital assistant, that we carry around not just in case somebody wants to talk with us, but because at times we may need to talk with it. Moreover, talking semiotically, we “write” on these devices, by customising desktop interfaces, adding pictures and wallpapers, making ringtones out of our favourite pop tracks, in order to make them ours. Machines are not just tools at our disposal but are culturally produced markers by which we construct our patterns of daily living, our relationships and our identities. We are Cyborg because we make machines like us in order to use them in the making of ourselves.
Yet while the “humanising” of technology is evident in the development of the Cyborg story, there is another side to it: the “machination” of the human person in modern biology, epistemology and sociology. The discovery of the chromosome prompted us to wonder how much of our impulses are guided by chemical software, and that the ultimate purpose of our existence is to maintain and recreate storage units for the information. Theorising the mind has also evolved into computing language, where memory is a network of neural pathways, and knowledge is a pattern of connecting between the outside world, our senses and the network. The poststructuralist sees human society as built by networks of power that entrance and control the individual into viewing the world, and his or her place in it, in a certain myopic way that is so overwhelming that should the network be taken away, the individual would not know why to get out of bed in the morning. Knowledge is intertwined with ideology, designed and communicated not just to enable a person’s comprehension of the outside world, but to confine to a particular role in that world. Atheism, while seen by the religious as an attack on the truth of revelation, is more an attack on the religious institutions which have become part of the great oppressive ideological machine by which we have been “programmed”.
In the apparent loss of the human soul in late modernity, past the point of no return to a time of magic and mysticism, the Cyborg has looked to technology to rediscover its humanity. Erik Davis (in the same book) tells us that technology has helped the Cyborg rise to a sense of meaning and renewal in recent history, by explaining the philosophies and stories of Gurdjieff’s “machine-man” and L Ron Hubbard’s “computer-mind”, and mentioning that while members of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s rejected new technologies as a form of abuse and imprisonment, lauded the invention of synthetic drugs like LSD to bring them to new states of awareness.
And to the Internet, a machine, but laden with possibilities and magic and mysticism, the new Cyborg sees an opportunity to find a new heaven and a new earth, free from the machinations of the body and material society.
Heidi Campbell just posted a link on her blog about a new report from the Alban Institute called The Networked Congregation. The front page promises some interested thoughts on congregational life amid Web 2.0. Unfortunately I totally suck at reading lengthy work on a screen, so I’m saving the report to PDF to read later. But it’s come at a great time for me as I’m thinking about what makes a religious community in the late modern information age.
Hey Matilde, you sent an email through this site to thank me for my piece on audiences and how it helped with your essay. You didn’t offer a return email address so I’m posting my reply here. I’m glad the slide was of help to you. I’m not sure how you managed to get to this site all the way from Quebec (or maybe New Brunswick?). Power of Google I guess, though try to make sure your teachers don’t find out you use Google or Wikipedia to get work for your essays.
