Theology and Virtuality: The Community of God in the Digital Age

Abstract

This paper suggests the self-conception of people set within a western society pervaded by digital apparatus must be conditioned by a certain ‘background’ understanding of the philosophical idea of ‘virtuality’. To practice Theology in this context means engaging with this background understanding to examine the way that it orders and values the ideas and material practices of such a society. This project attempts just such an examination by first exploring the history of virtuality so to better understand what is meant by the suggestion that we are living in Digital Age ordered by virtuality, and how we become situated in this way by a discursive cultural ‘rupture’. It will connect virtuality into several recent critiques of postmodern and ‘post-human’ thought, and in conclusion offer some constructive theological reflections in an attempt to both reconceive of virtuality and imagine the Church in relation to it.