The Net in Christ
I recently had the chance to catch up online with two friends in the United States, Shane O’Neill from Proven Ministries (I had the pleasure of being on a couple of episodes of their podcast “The Naked Gospel”) and Hope Johnson of Hope Unyielding and the recently launched HJ Editing. It was good to be able to catch up with them, and it was the shot in the arm that I needed to ward off the winter blues.
While I was glad to have caught up with them, one of the constant puzzles that I contend with is the status of friendships that I maintain over long distances with little more but an internet connection and a few social media channels. While I have not yet met either Shane or Hope in real space and time (we all got to know each other as a result of our respective writing and podcasting activities online), I am of the strong conviction that there is a substance underlying that friendship. A common faith in Jesus Christ was one such factor, but the question that nagged at me was the exact nature of the communion we share.
I had teased out one facet on this topic in discussions with another friend online, Fr Harrison Ayre, in an episode of Clerically Speaking. Still, that episode was not intended to deal with the exact question in this post, the question of what exactly underwrote the reality of our online friendships, especially if that friendship is with other Christians.
In the course of completing a book chapter project, I came across a passage in Networked Theology, written by two other friends Heidi Campbell and Stephen Garner. In a chapter asking the question “Who is my neighbour”, Campbell and Garner reminded me of one important dogmatic truth, that the Christian does not exist in and of him- or herself. “It is not I that live”, Paul’s letter to the Galatians says, “but Christ who lives in me”. In light of this scriptural passage, “to be Christian“, say Campbell and Garner, “is to be in Christ” (82). They cited Daniel Milgiore, who elaborated on this theme by saying that:
To be Christian is to participate by faith, love and hope in the new humanity present in Jesus, and that new humanity is one of renewed and realigned relationships”.
As I will argue in that book chapter, I think we can go even further to speak of this “participation in Jesus” in a more material, spatial fashion. To do this, I relied on a passage from Graham Ward’s Cities of God. Ward makes clear in that text that participating in Jesus is not some vague connective metaphor. Instead, Ward looks at the key importance the body of Christ makes as a new form of space in which everything lives, moves and has being. In Ward’s words, in Jesus the incarnate Word is:
creating a space within himself, a womb, within which (en Christo) the Church will expand and creation be recreated (113).
This is because, as I argue in the chapter, the body of Christ, particularly after His resurrection, ascension and extension in the Church at Pentecost, is no longer confined to the body He assumed as Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, in Graham Ward’s words:
The body of Jesus Christ, the body of God, is permeable, transcorporeal, transpositional. Within it all other bodies are situated and given their significance (113).
In other words, even the seeming virtuality of the net is not a free standing reality. Instead, even in its virtuality, it has a substance because it unfolds within the space of Christ’s body.
It is this kind of participation in Christ in which all friendships, including our online friendships. Even if they are not underwritten by a real-space-and-time connection, each relation find their substance as a real friendship.
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