Ecclesial Theology in Cyberspace
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
Regular readers of my work might already know that one of my ongoing research interests focuses on the implications of the digital landscape on the task of theology (you can see a sample of that work here and here). As part of that focus, I am currently working on a project on the implications of the digital landscape for theological methodology.
While this work will continue to evolve in the coming months, one thing that I cannot shake off is the implications of cyberspace on the ecclesial dimension of theology.
What do I mean by this?
In academia, there is a tendency to focus on the magisterial authority of the expertise of a single individual academic, and for good reason. It is the individual academic that has put the hard work and effort into unearthing truths hidden in the deposit of knowledge put together by academics before him, and also creating new insights that that deposit did not previously hold. The individual academic is thus rightly lauded as an expert in that field.
At one level, theology is like any other discipline, in that there is a human effort put into the arrangement and development of truths pertaining to that discipline, so one must give credit to the expertise of the individual theologian when it is due.
At the same time, however, this focus on the individual expert can lead us to neglect that there is a social dimension to research. Research is almost never done in isolation. Rather, the researcher is linked to certain communities of knowledge, which are then deployed as citations in the new work being produced. What this means is that all academic disciplines, as the name suggests, researchers are more like disciples, schooled in particular methods that are honed by a community of knowledge that existed before him or her. What this means is that all academic insights, even those of individual experts, emerge out of a specific context.
So it is with theology. As Graham Ward argues in Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, one of the first questions to ask is not what theology says, but from where theology speaks. Even when done as a solitary activity, theology speaks from a place, and as such emits from a particular context. Even solitary theologizing, Ward says, is “rendered meaningful only with respect to wider relational fields” (12). Thus theology - even as it comes from the expertise of individual theologians - also emerges from a specific context.
We then must ask: what constitutes this context? Ward goes on to explain in another place that theology emerges first from divine revelation and its sources, namely Scripture and Tradition. Along similar lines, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s document on The Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, says that the theologian’s role “is to pursue in a particular way an ever deeper understanding of the Word of God found in the inspired Scriptures and handed on by the living Tradition of the Church” (6). Put another way, the theologian speaks from the perspective of the deposit of faith, and stands within that deposit and never above it. It is out of this context that any theologian is able to articulate his or her own individual insights.
What is more, the theologian’s insights are not ends in and of themselves. They do not even simply serve the purpose of furthering the deposit of academic knowledge. Because theology speaks from the context of faith, the task of academic theology, as the Congregation says, is to “offers its contribution so that the faith might be communicated” (7), or in other words, aid the Church’s mandate in the transmission of the faith.
Thus, the theologian is not simply his or her own expert. In working from within the context of faith, the theologian’s work gets its dynamism because of its being situated in the deposit of Revelation, and by extension the Body of Christ who continues that event of Revelation. Thus, in order for the theologian’s work to maintain its dynamism, that work has two sets of relations to keep in mind, those to which the faith will be transmitted, but also those within the household of faith as instantiated in the Church.
The puzzle that I want to explore in this latest project is whether this ecclesial dimension of faith - and thus of theology that serves that faith - can remain as it is in a digital landscape. I have hinted at an answer in an earlier work on the ecclesiological effects of online Catholic celebrity. Drawing on Felicia Wu Song’s Virtual Communities, I made the argument that the digital landscape has a tendency to honeycomb communities into what Song called “lifestyle enclaves”, in which the celebrity stands at the top of the hierarchy as an ersatz expert. What this means in practice is that, rather than expertise being subordinate to faith and Church, as is the case in The Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, faith and Church will be made subordinate to the expertise - real or otherwise - of the celebrity.
I wonder if part of the puzzle here is that the transformative effect of the digital landscape is due to the fact that the faith and the Church constitute a landscape, and that the transformation is due to the latter being displaced by the former.
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