Jacob Shatzer - The Pandemic and Virtual Church

 I've got lots of thoughts on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected Christian worship and witness ... mostly how the impact has been harmful.  But instead of writing a lengthy diatribe, I thought I would just quote some words from Jacob Shatzer's Transhumanism and the Image of God.

In the midst of talking about the importance of place in a Christian understanding of the church (and how virtual reality will never be real reality), Shatzer writes:

"Bearing witness requires presence; it requires being somewhere.  Christians can certainly bear a form of witness in virtual places, and as those virtual experiences provide more and more of a sense of presence, that will become more common.  Yet the virtual will never be the same as physical presence.  We cannot shed the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ - the analogy being to the physical body of Christ, not Jesus's Second Life avatar.

"I think that deep down, part of us still knows that presence matters, and this vestige points to something true.  For instance, being present at a wedding or a funeral is obviously different from joining via teleconferencing. ...

"There will certainly be ways of doing church using virtual technology, but to the degree that we neglect physical presence with other believers, we neglect the form of being the body of Christ that has shaped Christianity for the past two thousand years.  We haven't always been able to gather together, but that has always been a centering ideal.  Humans were created as physical beings in physical proximity, in face-to-face relationships." (Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God, p. 139)

So, to those who wonder whether online church is just as valuable as in-person church ... it's not.  Even drive-in church is preferable to online.  To those who wonder why persecuted Christians in closed countries would risk imprisonment etc. by meeting in person ... wonder no longer.  To those who wonder why churches in the Western world were chafing at lock-down rules during Covid ... wonder no longer.  The physical gathering of the body of Christ in person is a central defining feature of what it means to be the Church.  Human beings are embodied creatures, and physical presence and contact is a non-negotiable need of human life.

Thank you, Dr. Shatzer, for putting into words the centrality of the local gathering of believers for worship!

For more, and an excellent discussion of transhumanism and post-humanism as philosophical and cultural trends in society, see:

Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today's Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019.