We are immersed in a world of the internet. It has changed our way of thinking and living. It also has a great influence on the way we practice our faith. Internet is a great opportunity for evangelization and many have already put their hand to this plough. May be it is time to understand what it does to out faith. It profoundly influences our understanding of the Church, liturgy, sacraments, grace and revelation. Already Pope Benedict of blessed memory had called us to reflect on the impact of what he called ‘digital thought’ on our faith and theology.
Internet is an environment that we have to come to inhabit so it is not enough how we use it to serve our faith but it is important to understand what it is doing to our faith. One obvious thing is that the internet does to us is that it connects us to each other. This linking us to each other is divine. We may view that invites us to view that Christ is calling his people to unite and build deep bonds of belonging together through the internet. Therefore, internet is not to be viewed as a territory held by the devil. This does not mean that there is no evil in the web. Indeed there is loads of evil. But cannot forget that we have the imperative to see God in everything. Ignation invitation to see God in everything can be our deep inspiration.
Technology that we invent is actually our desire for fullness of life which of course cannot be quenched by technology itself. Within this thirst, we might see internet as a desire for communal life. The internet is not a non-space like the railway station or bus stand. It is lived space. Hence, it deeply affects our ways of being human as well as ways of being Christian. It touches us and intimidates us and makes us wonder. We can no longer escape the internet and return to the good old innocent days. We are digital natives. Therefore, we cannot see it as a parallel reality that is pulsating alongside us. In fact, we have come to populate it so profoundly that there seems to be no human experience outside it. But it also remains invisible to us. We are ‘ wired’ but without physical modes of connection. This is why some people say that we have stepped into a Phigital world. All technology is an extension of human powers. It is extension of humans. This means our humanity also unfolds through technology.
Our world would be very different without the invention of fire, wheel and the alphabet. We become better humans on the wings of these technologies. We enhanced our capacity to knowledge, care, relationship, freedom and responsibility through this growing world of technology. Technology thus affected the way we live our faith. Without prejudice, we can regard technology as resources to live fully as humans even though it requires scrutiny, wise and responsible usage. Hence, it is not enough to see an opportunity to spread the Gospel through the internet. It is important to integrate Gospel in the entire culture of the internet. This would need us to work to convert the internet into a digital witness through our presence and work within it.
The web is not just a means of evangelization, it is a context where we have the challenge to live our faith. Perhaps, the internet expresses the mastery of the Spirit over the material. Perhaps, it enables us rise above our daily mundane experiences and reach out to the divine. Our Christian ear thus, stives to hear the divine call and discern our response in this new digital environment. This is perhaps spirituality that is arising from Homo Tecnologicus.
Technological being is a spiritual being. But we cannot forget that technology can generate high decimals of alienation and leave the poor behind producing Homo Disraptus. This is why we need a deeply relevant spirituality to the Homo Digitalis in the web. Moreover, technology can produce a sense of self sufficiency and take us away from God and other humans. This is why we need a spirituality that will keep our feet on the ground and enable us to stay humble.
Technology does embody human desire for transcendence or our quest for fullness of life. It is in and through this desire for fullness of life embodied in the internet that we can find ways of reaching out to God. This embodied nature of our thirst for the divine within technology underlines our finitude and our desire for the infinite. When we attune ourselves to this spiritual movement in the technology, we will be enabled to understand how the Holy Spirit is at work bring about an intersection between technology and spirituality. It is when we open ourselves to the workings of the Holy Spirit that we will find our response to our digital world as well as work to make the internet a digital witness.
Here we have to be cautious about falling into what we may call technological determinism. Hence, we need to discern the Spirit of transcendence and stay critically or prophetically open to the Holy Spirit already at work in the world of the internet. While the internet displays digital intelligence with the coming AI, we can see how it offers us the foretaste of divine intelligence that supercedes it a hundred folds. Thus, we have the challenge to access the intelligence of our faith to see God in the world of the internet. Therefore, effort to develop cybertheology appears to be an urgent need of the hour.