I would count myself among those whom Prof. Thompson identifies as “digital skeptics,” yet I was profoundly moved by her thoughtful and achingly personal, theological reflection on her experience of the “virtual body of Christ” as someone living with a stage IV cancer diagnosis. Even if Thompson’s thoughtful work has not facilitated for me the metanoia she hoped for (10), she has nudged me toward a greater recognition of the constructive role that virtual networks and digital technology in general can play in the life of the church.

Thompson is certainly correct in noting that across the history of humanity, each new communicative technology effected a kind of revolution that, in turn, instigated a sense of crisis. Each new technology gave rise to a community of skeptical naysayers. Historical awareness can do much to ease the anxiety of contemporary naysayers. Thompson’s book offers a persuasive exhortation to resist this kind of handwringing in favor of more clear-headed theological and pastoral reflection on both the dangers and opportunities of virtual networks. Central to her argument is her persuasive insistence that it is unhelpful and misleading to think of virtual reality as radically discontinuous with physical/actual/real existence. If we can recognize a continuum in our engagement with the “real,” she has made the case well that virtual reality is potentially continuous with more physically embodied existence (11) and can offer not so much an alternative to the real as an “augmentation” of it.

In her critical engagement with an exemplary “digital skeptic,” Nicholas Carr, she posits two basic approaches to digital technology: technological determinism and technological instrumentalism (15–16). Thompson is no naïve technological booster. One of the real strengths of her book is her sustained engagement with digital skeptics (e.g., Carr, James Davison Hunter, Michael Frost) and her ready admission that there are indeed dangers attached to digital technologies. Yet she argues that in spite of these dangers, “if we’re intentional and imaginative about how we use it, digitized Internet technology can also enhance, deepen, and even transform our connections with one other [sic]” (17). As a quite compelling example, she offers her own life story, sharing with the reader the many ways in which “the virtual body of Christ” was made present to her by way of virtual networks like CaringBridge. While incapacitated and spiritually debilitated by her advanced cancer and the radical treatment it required, through virtual networks like CaringBridge, family and friends who were geographically distant could make known to her their prayers and concerns. Christian communities spread across the globe were made aware of her illness and through these networks, were able to pray on her behalf as a tangible expression of the unity of the body of Christ.

While recognizing the complexity of the issue, Thompson does come down on the side of technological instrumentalism, arguing that “when technology is understood as a tool, its ability to help make lives better or worse depends on how it is used” (16, italics in the original). It is here, with Thompson’s preference for a more instrumental approach to technology that I find my core reservations with her argument. My own perspective has long been shaped by the work of the philosopher Albert Borgmann, whose life work attended to the ways in which technology shapes our experience and assessment of authentic human existence.1 Borgmann’s argument, much influenced by Heidegger, is that our daily lives are increasingly being lived within what he calls the “device paradigm” in which the ubiquity of technological devices, each of which might be entirely defensible, is cumulatively exerting tremendous influence on the shape of ordinary human existence. The device paradigm shapes our experience of ordinary human existence through the processes of commodification and disburdenment. Friction, burden, vulnerability, discipline—these are the dimensions of human existence from which the device paradigm would save us. In this regard, Borgmann maps closely with Neil Postman’s concern regarding the changing “ecology” of daily human existence.2 Here we might consider as well the work of Sherry Turkle, an early digital technology booster who, in her later work, has raised concerns regarding how these technologies may in fact be affecting something as elemental as our capacity for sustained human conversation.3 A more “ecological” analysis of the effects of digital technologies on our daily life might still grant the positive gains and contributions of virtual networks like CaringBridge for extending the compassionate work of the body of Christ. However, this approach would insist on asking whether these technologies might have other, unanticipated consequences for the life of the church. It is precisely these larger ecological concerns that give me pause regarding Thompson’s more directly ecclesiological claims.

Thompson grounds her argument for a positive recognition of “the virtual body of Christ” in St. Paul’s employment of body of Christ imagery. She begins her second chapter with a quotation often attributed to St. Teresa of Avila, that asserts how we, Christ’s followers, constitute his hands and feet in the world. It is a beautiful passage, one that has inspired many to claim their active role within the body of Christ. However, in the very first sentence of the chapter she asserts that “Christ is present virtually, through the bodies and the actions of his followers” (31, italics in the original). As a Roman Catholic, that statement brought me up short. Catholicism’s commitment to the principle of sacramentality leads it to affirm the fundamental sacramentality of the church. Thus, where Thompson speaks of Christ “virtually present” through the members of the church, I would be more inclined to say that Christ is so present “sacramentally.” This then forces me to ask whether in ecclesial discourse Thompson’s use of the term “virtually” here is really equivalent to what as a Catholic I would mean by the term “sacramentally.” The question gained force when I realized that throughout her treatment of Paul’s appropriation and employment of the body of Christ metaphor, she at no point remarked on Paul’s fundamental connection between the ecclesial body of Christ and the Eucharistic body of Christ in 1 Cor 10:16–17.4 I would like to hear more from her on how she understands the relationship between virtual presence and sacramental presence.

Later in this same chapter Thompson builds on the work of Jason Byassee and his assertion that Paul’s body of Christ has always been a “virtual” body. Implicit in Paul’s letters is a sense of the body of Christ that, while focused in individual Christian communities, includes a wider notion of the body of Christ that “does not always depend on face-to-face interaction, one that I am calling the virtual body of Christ” (39, italics in the original). Through Paul’s letters and envoys, he was able to sustain, even in his physical absence, a deep connection to various local churches. He felt himself to be part of the body of Christ even when absent from a local community. For Thompson, this speaks of a “virtual” ecclesial connection that was quite real even though it was different from the kind of physical connection enabled by geographic proximity to these communities. She associates the “virtual” dimension of the body of Christ with the church’s universality. But just as I am uneasy with identifying the virtual presence of Christ with sacramentality, so I am reluctant to identify it with the universality or catholicity of the church. Certainly, Paul felt a tangible and enduring ecclesial relationship to these communities even when he was absent. And, in this sense, it seems quite legitimate to recognize here a trans-local or universal dimension to the body of Christ metaphor. But can we speak of Paul’s spiritual connection to the body of Christ as virtual? I am less sure. For it seems to me that among the salient characteristics of “virtual” community today is that it is made possible by the digital collapse or at least radical contraction of geographic and temporal distance in favor of a kind of digital immediacy. Albert Borgmann has reflected on this through his analysis of hyperreality, an experience of reality that is not “almost real” but in important ways is perceived as better than the real.5 Indeed, Thompson at some points herself suggests that the virtual presence afforded by virtual networks is better than the real. There are instances, she asserts, when virtual presence provides the comfort that comes with an expression of care, but without the discomfort of a physical presence that can be awkward and even intrusive.

St. Paul’s genuine bond to the various communities with which he was in relationship was dramatically conditioned by a sense of absence, longing and anticipation of some later return to the community. Put simply, Paul’s sense of belonging to the body of Christ even when absent from particular communities, was doubtless real, but I do not think it was an experience of anything like what people experience today when they speak of virtual community. For virtual reality, much like Borgmann’s hyperreality, offers a technologically enabled encounter that is often experienced as “better than the real” because it is able to radically circumvent the deprivations associated with temporality and geographic distance.

Virtual community, at least as Thompson understands it, seems less an experience of the universal dimension of the church than a digital extension of the sense of ecclesial locality. That is, virtual networks can allow me to feel and act as if I were geographically or physically present within the local community. This is quite different from a genuine experience of the church’s catholicity. For the authentic catholicity of the church is not a technologically extended experience of connection with a particular local church. It is a recognition of a mysterious spiritual and ecclesial connection with persons and communities who are often dramatically different from one’s own community. Thompson gives moving testimony of her experience of this universal connection effected by virtual networks as she is made aware of Christian communities in other parts of the world that are praying for her. But, of course, the virtual connection will, by necessity, minimize the otherness of that distant community’s practices and theological self-understandings. This doesn’t negate the experience itself, but it does suggest that the virtual network is in fact mediating something closer to an extended local community than a true experience of the church’s catholicity. In sum, I am concerned about some theological slippage in the ecclesial employment of the term “virtual.”

Finally, let us consider another expression of the “virtual” body of Christ that Thompson proposes, online worship. I share with her the conviction that online worship can often be a spiritual lifeline for shut-ins and those with significant disabilities. However, in such instances, we are speaking of online worship as a pastoral accommodation. In the Roman Catholic church something of this is in play as Catholics are encouraged to watch a televised mass as a pastoral accommodation to infirmity, for example, but not as the ordinary and preferred mode of liturgical participation. Although Thompson offers a sympathetic presentation of “fully virtual incarnations of church” she admits that she is “committed to virtual practices of church augmenting rather than replacing in-person practices” (95). However, the logic of her argument made it unclear to me why in fact she wouldn’t want to embrace “fully virtual incarnations of the church.” My own resistance would focus on the ways in which virtual networks are inclined toward experiences of the hyperreal in which it is all too easy to avoid the awkwardness, burdens and vulnerabilities that so often attend upon physical presence.

I agree with Thompson that it is unfair to dismiss virtual expressions of Christian community as always guilty of “click activism.” Clearly, as her testimony eloquently demonstrates, that is not always the case. There can be no doubt regarding the good and caring uses to which digital technologies can be put in service of gospel values. Yet throughout her work I could not shake the nagging sense that while she clearly wished to acknowledge the concerns of digital skeptics, her positive experience of the virtual body of Christ in the midst of her illness ultimately trumped those concerns. I can respect that judgment even if I can’t entirely agree with it.

I am fully persuaded by Thompson that digital skeptics need to be more open to the possibility that virtual networks and related digital technologies can, when employed with discrimination and due discernment, augment and enhance the life and ministry of the church. Her insistence that virtual presence need not always and everywhere be radically discontinuous with physical presence and her many examples of how such virtual presences have, in her experience, been genuine encounters with the body of Christ, all is quite convincing. At the end of the day, however, Thompson’s experience has inclined her to a largely instrumentalist approach to digital technologies. In that regard, her argument may stand as a helpful corrective to the romanticism and neo-Luddite tendencies of so many digital critics, but it falls short of providing a theologically satisfying affirmation of why Christians should be celebrating the reality of a truly virtual body of Christ.

Professor Thompson’s The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World is one of a growing number of theological treatments of modern technology. Thompson’s book stands out in this burgeoning subfield for its creativity, nuance, and courage. Because a stage IV cancer diagnosis and the subsequent experience of being “really sick” (3) is the context for Thompson’s work, I want to be very clear that my use of the word “courage” is broader than the common (and frankly, overused and somewhat patronizing) use of the term towards people who are or have been ill. Thompson’s text is courageous because it is creative and nuanced. She has the courage to do what few theologians have done with regard to the topic of digital culture: to suggest in theologically serious terms that there is more here than just more sin, and that it is a real human space (warts and all) within which the church not only can but must translate its self-understanding as the body of Christ.

In what follows, I reflect on different aspects of Thompson’s text, focusing on what I read to be the most persuasive and salient features of her argument. I want to also pose a question or two for Professor Thompson on these aspects. Because I find her text theologically rich, it only makes sense that the areas in her work that I find the most appealing are also the areas in which I want to offer a few suggestions for further theological engagement with this unavoidable topic.

In her first chapter, Thompson invokes Stanley Hauerwas to describe a standard by which we might measure our church communities (19). In doing so, Thompson gets right to the heart of the matter for theologians, most of whom find digital culture worthy of study because it represents new (and increasingly totalizing) ways of being social. The church, we theologians might say, is social life par excellence. It is the place in which, through Word and Sacrament, we strive imperfectly to recapture life with God and with each other we once enjoyed in the Garden. An emphasis on the social dimensions of the church has worked itself out in various ways across Christian traditions. It undergirds both the universalism of Catholicism as well as the sometimes singular focus on local communities in Protestantism. It also works out in different ways within the same tradition. For example, it supports both the societas perfectas of ultramontane Catholicism, as well as the communion ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council.

The particularly Hauerwasian contribution to this longstanding view of the church lies in his contextualizing it in an American framework, namely within democracy and capitalism. Hauerwas insists upon the social reality of the church against the simulacra of social connection forged by capitalism and democratic politics. Such insistence is incredibly effective in critiquing cultural dynamics with values out of step with the gospel. The persistent temptation of this insistence, however, has two, mutually reinforcing sides. The first is to idealize the church to such a degree that one’s picture of the church is neither reflective of its human realities nor its susceptibilities to history. The second is to understand one’s cultural context as so thoroughly sinful as to be incapable of bearing the grace of God beyond its direct and instrumentalized contributions to the church community. The first I hear in Hauerwas’s words, quoted by Thompson: “When the church is being the church, it should be a strong-tie environment made up of people ‘who have learned how to be faithful to one another by our willingness to be present, with all our vulnerabilities, to one another’” (19). Thompson forges ahead here by insisting that online networks foster both weak- and strong-tie environments. Surely this is a strong point, and one that needs to be made. She makes it predominantly from her own experiences of sickness, and the online communities from whom she drew support (22–23).

In the spirit of Thompson’s argument here, I want to suggest that we can go even further within the categories of weak- and strong-ties vis-à-vis the church. Near the end of her book, Thompson writes of people in her offline faith community with whom she is also connected online, “I am often struck by how much more I know about those same people’s joys and sorrows from my virtual connections with them than I know about most fellow church members whom I am not connected to online” (99). Her acknowledgment here is in response to Hauerwas: seeking after those strong-tie relationships so central to the church, Thompson argues that the internet can be a place to find and foster them. But need we begin with the assumption that the church should be held to the standard of a strong-tie environment? Thompson’s experience of “hybrid” relationships with her fellows does indeed speak to the potential of online contexts augmenting of ecclesial social life. What the statement above also acknowledges, however, is that our social relationships within the church often fall short of the standard described by Hauerwas. One might, of course, lament this reality. I believe we’d be better served to understand the church as a social body whose members often connect with only weak ties, bolstered by few and precious strong-tie relationships. Thompson’s experiences on this point, I think, challenge Hauerwasian ways of thinking about the church as ideal because of its strong ties. This ideal puts undue pressure on the social relationships between members of faith communities, and tempts us toward easy rejection of cultural forms (such as the internet) that do not meet this standard.1

Though I’ve made much here of the weak- and strong-tie language of social science, ultimately Thompson draws on Paul for her vision of the church in the digital age. As her title suggests, Thompson grounds her understanding of the social life of the church in the Pauline image of the body of Christ. She takes great care to present various aspects of Paul’s life and ministry that demonstrate, as she titles the chapter, that “the Body of Christ has been and will always be a virtual body.” Central to this incisive and important assertion is the medium of Paul’s ministry: the letter. She focuses on Paul’s use and adaptation of ancient language conventions within the letters, highlighting his use of “body” imagery “to help communicate his vision for what it means to be this new community that sees itself unified in Christ” (35).

It is on the subject of virtuality that I find my most pressing question for Thompson: How exactly does the “virtual” relate to the “network”? Before giving her analysis of Pauline ecclesiology summarized above, Thompson acknowledges that to understand “virtual” to mean “almost” (as we often do in its common usage) is inadequate (40). Later, she insists that virtual interactions can indeed be incarnational, and in some cases, more so than face-to-face counterparts (58). But throughout the text, “virtual” remains for the most part theologically undefined, and variously exchanged for terms like “network” (51), “connect/connection” (49), and “shared participation” (48).2 These terms are not synonymous, even though virtual space often facilitates them. We will benefit greatly from definition of such concepts as we proceed as digital theologians. In particular, virtuality is much richer and much more ripe for theological inflection than we see in its communicative or connective abilities. For example, Thompson draws on Elizabeth Drescher to describe Paul as a “networked communicator” (42). This is surely a correct description for Paul, and his letters functioned as symbols of the network(s) created by his communication. But this can obscure a more complex reality: Paul himself is mediated in the letters, for indeed so much of his ministry occurred in his physical absence (a fact Thompson acknowledges). Most recipients of Paul’s teachings would have heard the letters read aloud. Paul’s letters, therefore, operated (and continue to operate) as a virtual space wherein Paul’s very presence as well as the presence of the other communities to which he was in correspondence, is mediated to the hearing church.

Thompson comes just shy of calling Paul’s letters themselves a virtual space, but I think his argument here goes in such a direction. Furthermore, I think that there is great potential here for both theologians and biblical scholars to think deeply about the mediating dynamics of text and text-based culture. That is, while Paul’s letters lend themselves to the category of virtuality in a special way given their moment in ecclesial history, I think all of Scripture itself opens itself to a new hermeneutic of the virtual, especially when understood as the productive space between presence and absence. Thus understood, virtuality becomes a hermeneutic for understanding the vast array of mediating structures within the church even outside of Scripture. Architecture, statuary, sacred objects, music, sensory experiences like incense, devotional spaces, relics, and much more open themselves to new theological analysis of virtuality. Saturated as we are in spaces that blur the lines between presence and absence, we are ready to encounter anew the paradoxes of dualities at the heart of gospel.

By framing her work in the context of her own illness, Professor Thompson has given voice to just one of the many human experiences that challenge the theological temptation to renounce technological culture. I want to close by thanking her for writing it, and for writing it the way she did, for the text itself functioned for me as a virtual space wherein I encountered the body of Christ.

It is a deep honor to respond to Deanna Thompson’s elegant and important monograph, The Virtual Body of Christ. The honor is so deep because Thompson is such a singular, authentic, graceful and gifted theologian. As a person and as a professional, she shines glory on our vocation. I am grateful for the opportunity to join in conversation with her work by means of this response.

“Responding” to the work of other thinkers is an important part of our calling. Often, we respond to each other within our narrow specialties. Psalms scholars respond to each other within the guild of biblical studies. Liberation theologians do the same within the guild of systematic theologians. And so on. Sometimes, as is the case here, we respond to each other across fairly wide interdisciplinary boundaries. And when we do, having engaged a very different kind of work than we normally study, we often ask ourselves, “What knowledge and experience do I have to bring to the table (without having to learn an entire new field of thought)?” So what do I know that I can bring to the table so beautifully set by Thompson’s new book? At least three things. I know biblical studies—especially Psalms studies. I also know the brand of theology that Lutherans and others call the theology of the cross. And I know cancer. I’ll work in reverse, starting with the last of these three.

I. Cancer—Before and After Digital Social Media

I respond here as one who knows cancer. I won’t say I know cancer better than any other cancer survivor—certainly not better than Thompson. But when thinking about how digital media have changed the ways in which the body of Christ can be present with those suffering through the trauma of cancer, I have an advantage (can that be the right word?) over Thompson. I’ve had cancer twice. Once before digital media. And once after.

Although I had known of Deanna Thompson for many years—we are both Lutherans who live and teach in St. Paul, Minnesota; our fathers are both well-know Lutheran pastors—I first met Thompson in the spring of 2009.

That timing was important for both of our personal stories. For Deanna (as I shall now call her), it was shortly after her diagnosis with stage IV breast cancer. That diagnosis and her battle with that disease provide the occasion for much of the reflection she does in The Virtual Body of Christ.

Here is my cancer story, stated as briefly as I am able.

On Sunday afternoon, November 16, 1980, my dad and I were throwing a football in our front yard when my dad called over our family physician, who lived next door, to take a look at a growth on my right leg.

Three days later that leg was amputated at the Mayo Clinic.

Over the next three years, I had over twenty surgeries—including the amputation of my other leg—several courses of chemotherapy, and one regimen of radiation.

My last surgery—one of twelve lung resections to remove the cancer that had spread to both lungs—was July 1980. At the time, of course, we didn’t know it was the last surgery. It just was. The cancer quit showing up.

Twenty-four years passed. I went to college, seminary, got ordained, got married, earned a PhD, had two kids, got tenure. You know, a normal life for a guy with no legs.

In June 2007, a cough that I couldn’t shake turned out to be my childhood nemesis, back like a bad dream. A small sleeper cell of cancer cells had laid low in my right lung for about twenty-six years—since 1980 or ’81. For no known reason, the cancer cells started to grow after twenty-six years. And because I wasn’t getting regular check-ups any longer—after all, nobody in recorded human history had ever gone twenty-seven years between diagnoses—the tumor in my lung got way big, way bigger than it should have been allowed to get.

Back to Mayo Clinic. The tumor was contained, they decided to cut it out. Before they could, I had to do a few tests to show my body could tolerate the surgery. As I went into the last of those tests—an echocardiogram—my wife started a CaringBridge page for me.

I was furious. She didn’t even ask if it was okay. I would have said no.

The test took an hour. When I returned from the echo, there were already hundreds of visits to the CaringBridge page from across the country.

I was grateful. Grateful to my wife for setting up the page, grateful for the outpouring of love through the digital media. Grateful to God for the body of Christ all around me. And let me assure you. I felt the love of Christ and his body throughout that long summer of 2007.

[Update: I am still clear of cancer. And I am very jealous of my world record of twenty-six years between initial diagnosis and late recurrence. #Worldrecordholder.]

My Point: I’ve had cancer both before digital media and after. And in terms of how the media allows us to surround isolated people with the love and presence of Christ, it is way better to be sick in the age of digital media than before the age of digital media.

The most isolated part of my life came in 1981–82, when I was basically bedridden for five months and missed school the entire time. I had almost no contact other than my family and a few friends who would visit when they could. It was, quite honestly, a lonely and terrifying time. I would have very much appreciated the digitally mediated love of the body of Christ in those days. One criticism of the internet—which Thompson addresses—is that digital connections tend to be weaker than more embodied connections. Thompson addresses that critique well, so I will not rehash her work here. But I will simply testify—in a biblical way—that any ties that bind us to each other in times of suffering are worth the effort.

Deanna’s book contains an assertion and a plea—both well analyzed and articulated. The assertion is rather straightforward. First, the church—the body of Christ—has always been a virtual reality. It was precisely that virtual reality that Paul both assumed as he provided pastoral leadership to, for example, the congregation in Corinth from literally across the sea. Building on this assumed virtual reality—that all Christians form one body in Christ even when they are separated from each other—Paul then employed the social medium of his day, the epistle, to be present to the congregations to which he wrote. As Deanna summarizes, “Paul imagined the church not just in local terms but also as extending beyond the individual local communities” (43). In a particularly lovely passage, she argues that “the virtual body of Christ [is] a body that is wedded to but also transcends specific, individual incarnations of church” (47). For our own day, Deanna also issues the plea that the church use the digital media of the internet to mediate the presence of body of Christ to the weakest members of the community. Her plea: “Won’t you join me in proclaiming the good news of the virtual body of Christ?” Yes, I will.

II. The Theology of the Cross

Like Deanna Thompson, I claim the identity of a theologian of the cross. Deanna’s first book, Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism and the Cross, took as its departure point Luther’s early formulation of the theology of the cross in the Heidelberg Disputation. There, Luther wrote the famous dictum that only that person “deserves to be a called a theologian . . . who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross” (thesis 18) and also that a “theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is” (thesis 19).

Deanna continues to work the theology of the cross throughout the middle portions of her current book, especially in chapters 2–4. In these chapters she asserts first that the body of Christ is now and has always been “virtual.” Second, she argues that Christianity—the most radically incarnational religion—must recast its commitment to incarnational living in light of the digital age. (The four points she makes on pp. 69–73 are particularly important). In essence, this section is an abbreviated effort to recast the church’s use of digital media in light of the theology of the cross: “Incarnational living in the digital age, then, translates into a radical openness within the community of the church not only to hearing the cries of our neighbors but also to imagining new ways of serving neighbors in love through both the virtual and actual worlds” (73). Third, she argues for the church’s use of digital media to give care what she repeatedly calls “the weakest members of the body of Christ.”

Deanna’s extrapolation of the theology of the cross and her application of that theology’s themes to digital means of being present to one another are excellent. Here the reader will find the heart of this elegant volume and the theological work that makes this volume a must read for pastors.

I want to press Deanna to go a little further on a couple of matters. First, I want to press Deanna to go even further into the theology of the cross. I would like to see her engage the conversation she has started regarding digital ways of the body of Christ being present virtually, with the greater range of the themes of the theology of the cross. I find that she has focused her theological reflection very acutely on the body of Christ being present to its weakest members, which is one theme of the theology of the cross. But several other skeins of theological yarn are also worth spinning out and weaving into her theological loom. First, I would name the theme of the theology of the cross that God meets us in our suffering. Recall that Luther asserted that only that person “deserves to be a called a theologian . . . who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.” Which is to say, a theologian of the cross must be able to name—in the midst of suffering—the present manifestation of the crucified-and-risen Christ. The power of Deanna’s personal narrative and I hope the power of my own narrative is that they bear witness to the transformative presence of God in our suffering. Counter to the rational conclusions of the world, suffering is not proof of the absence of God. Rather, suffering is where God promises to show up and does so, through the ministry of the church. Martin Luther famously wrote in Article III.iv of the Smalcald Articles, “Of the Gospel,” that “through the mutual conversation and consolation of the saints” God “gives us counsel and aid against sin [and] is abundantly rich and liberal in his grace and goodness.”

This is a rather shocking bit of Luther’s theology of the cross. Luther is saying that the ministry of the body of Christ—“the mutual conversation and consolation of the saints”—is nigh unto equal with the preached Word and the sacraments of baptism and holy communion as “means of grace.” If this much is true—and I believe that it is true—then digital means of multiplying the “mutual conversation and consolation of the saints” is not just about the church caring for the weakest members of the community, these digital media also provide the means for God’s very self to be manifest and present in the lives of those isolated by disease, sin, and other forms of isolating brokenness. I fear that I am not being clear enough, so let me try one more time. Digital means of doing ministry are not just about the church caring for its weakest members, digital means of doing ministry are ways in which the Risen Christ himself can be present with the suffering, just as Christ has promised to be.

The theology of the cross, after all, is not just a theology of ethics. It is a theology of revelation. It confesses that Christ is revealed as being present in suffering. The cross has paradoxically revealed God as present in the very last place any rational process of deduction would look for the living God—in the cross, where a savior was tortured to death by the empire. The cross has revealed that the very Creator of life can and must be found in a dead Savior. In fact, if one is looking for Christ one must meditate on the cross and seek out the suffering. As Luther wrote regarding Galatians 1:4:

True Christian religion begins, no at the top, as other religions do, but at the bottom. Therefore whenever you are concerned to consider your salvation, you must put away all speculations about the majesty of God, and put away all thoughts of works, traditions, and philosophy. You must run directly to the manger and the virgin’s womb, embrace this infant and look at him—born, nursing, growing up, going about human society, teaching, dying, rising again. . . .

There is much more to say on this matter, but for reasons of length I must stop here. Suffice it to say that I would like to see Deanna work this theme—and other themes of the theology of the cross—at greater length in terms of her attention to the virtual body of Christ.

A related aside. Deanna dips her toe briefly into some very deep theological waters in the book. Early on in the book, she speaks of interfaith friends mediating blessings to her virtually. How does one frame the issue as “the virtual body of Christ” and also speak of the blessings mediated virtually from interfaith friends? I am out of my depth here, I ask Deanna for help. Later on in the book, during her discussion of digital media cultivating the church’s attention to those who need it most, she touches on the “real presence” of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of holy communion; she begs the question of where the promise spoken via a lifestream might convey Christ’s presence to the believers. I know a pastor who experimented with live streaming of worship and at the time of the sacrament announced something like, “And those of you who are watching online, go and get some bread and wine and join us. Christ will be present in body and blood for you, also.” Deanna is very strong and clear regarding digital media’s ability to foster the attentiveness of the body of Christ to those who are in need. But there are murky questions. Are the promises of the absolution, the reconciliation of the peace, and the blessing of the benediction also mediated virtually? What about the promises of baptism and the Lord’s Supper? I do not think the body of Christ will be able to ignore these questions.

III. Biblical Theology—Especially the Psalms

I would also like to press Deanna to engage her reflection on the virtual body of Christ with the Bible more broadly, and especially with the psalms. Deanna chose to frame her theological reflection as about “the virtual body of Christ.” Perhaps because of this (or because she is Lutheran), she draws primarily upon the letters of Paul in her theological. As a biblical theologian, I want to praise Deanna for her careful work with the text. Although trained as a theologian and not a biblical scholar, Deanna’s work with the biblical text—especially her work with the undisputed Pauline corpus and the disputed Pauline corpus—is excellent. Her work with the Synoptic Gospels is similarly strong.

But I want to press Deanna on two small matters. First, regarding Paul’s use of the body of Christ metaphor for the church in 1 Corinthians, I believe one aspect of that metaphor that Deanna slightly underplays is that each member of the body has different spiritual gifts. Recall that one of the things dividing the Corinthian congregation was the dispute over which gifts where “greater”—speaking in tongues, knowledge and prophecy, deeds of power, and the like. Paul emphasized that everyone in the congregation had all of the spiritual gifts only if they all belonged together. Those who speak in tongues need interpreters of tongues or they are merely clanging cymbals. Those who have prophetic powers but lack love are nothing. We only have all the gifts if we persists in the body together. One thing this means for the virtual body of Christ is that those who are isolated and suffering are not merely in need of the care and gifts of the strong and healthy, the strong and healthy also need the spiritual gifts of the isolated and weak. Ministry via digital means is not a one-way flow of grace! Grace and spiritual gifts flow both ways. In addition, we must remember what Paul taught about the spiritual gifts. Each of us has our own unique set of the lesser spiritual gifts, but everyone can seek the greater spiritual gifts: faith, hope, and the greatest of all, love. Digital means of ministry must strive for these greater gifts: faith, hope and love.

Second, I want to press Deanna to engage with the biblical canon more broadly . . . especially with the psalms. Surprise, surprise. I am a psalms scholar. A broken record. As if this weren’t completely predictable.

I raise this issue because I understand the psalms—especially the psalms of lament—as the first-person form in which the theology of the cross gets embodied. The psalms of lament are what the theology of the cross sounds like “out loud.” One of the themes of the theology of the cross is that a theologian of the cross “calls the thing what it actually is,” while a theologian of glory “calls evil good and good evil.” To put this in terms of suffering, a theologian of glory flinches back from accusing God of being negligent or unfaithful in the midst of suffering, but instead offers a stream of profanities that calls evil good. Just four examples: “When God closes a door, God opens a window”; “There is a reason for everything”; “God never gives us more than we can handle”; “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” And other such theological vulgarities, in which the pig’s nose of suffering is decorated with theological snout rings. Such is the theology of glory.

The theologian of the cross says to this, “Crap! Suffering is suffering; evil is evil; pain is pain.” And none of it is good. In the midst of suffering, the theologian of the cross doesn’t prevaricate, but yells at God and says, “Where are you? Why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far from my suffering?” And the like. All of this is the “body language” of the “body of Christ.”

At some point in the future—if we are given enough time (sigh)—it would be rewarding to entertain the conversation about how Deanna’s theological reflections on the virtual body of Christ might play out with other aspects of biblical theology.

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I wish to reiterate my thanks to Deanna Thompson for this rich and elegant volume, as well as the opportunity to engage in this symposium. It is an honor to know and love Deanna as a friend and to participate in this conversation. May the Lord give us many more years to devote to the mutual conversation and consolation of the saints.

To be is to be in relation. That rule admits of no exceptions and never has. That ontological truth has been affirmed by a variety of traditions including most especially by strands of Christian and Buddhist traditions. The invention of social media has not altered ontology, but it has transformed the character of our being in relation in innumerable practical ways, ways that we are only just beginning to appreciate.

To begin with, we are now in mediated relationship and ongoing conversation with a range of persons whom we have never physically met and may never meet, by means of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a number of other platforms. What are our obligations to each other? Do we have any? Just who is my digital neighbor? What virtues and dispositions must we cultivate in ourselves if we are to love our digital neighbor, stranger, and enemy? What can my words do, and what, if anything, can they fail to do when I know that no embrace can accompany them? Can I console you or you me when you can never wipe away my tears or me yours? Am I obliged to love my digital enemy who trolls my public Facebook posts?

I know of no richer work of theology to begin to think through and live into these questions with than Deanna Thompson’s moving and profoundly considered The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World. Most readers of these reviews will know that this Lutheran theologian writes from her experience of being diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer entirely without warning in her early forties. A vital, prolific theologian, professor, wife and mother, her life is derailed by a disease that leaves her feeling betrayed by her body.

Then, as Thompson relates, something transpires that in its positive power proves to be nearly an equal and opposite reaction to the cancer diagnosis. Thompson’s life is infused by an intensity of virtual but nonetheless very real love of global reach through virtual platforms like the support site CaringBridge. Her encounter with such love “converts” her to a new confidence that social media can become, as it most definitely has for her, the virtual body of Christ. People whom she does not know, entire churches with whom she has no personal connection, pray for her, send her tangible expressions of care and concern, and bind their lives with hers in ways small and large. Thompson shows us that the reach and depth of this care is hardly ephemeral or even immaterial; deep and sustained connections marked by mutual vulnerability are built across a range of communities—cancer recovery communities, local churches, academic networks, and even into other religious communities.

The language of conversion is not mine—it is Thompson’s, and she means it theologically. She is talking about metanoia and nothing less. Her experience, as she narrates it, has all the raw power of testimony. Even resistant readers, skeptical of digital media, are likely to be moved and, in some measure, persuaded to reconsider the virtual world as a place in which the community of the incarnation can live out a new form of incarnate life with special attention to “the weakest among us.”

Thompson’s experience of metanoia launches her into a wide-ranging exploration of the ethical and theological implications of our hybrid lives as we live them out in “the real world” and “the virtual world.” In a major and decisive intervention, Thompson insists that her readers must give up thinking of “virtual” as “almost,” that is to say almost real. Particularly striking is one context in which she makes this argument: the Apostle Paul’s extensive virtual rather than physical relationships mediated by his letters. Speaking about Paul’s relationship with the Corinthian church, she writes, “This point highlights once again the inadequacy of thinking about the term virtual as meaning almost. Paul is decidedly more than almost a part of these communities; he is founder, leader, guide, and inspiration to multiple church communities simultaneously” (emphasis original). She argues quite strikingly that the church catholic has always been composed of more than just its various local communities; rather the church in its very catholicity is a virtual body tied together and sustained by Paul’s virtual epistolary ministry.

Through a variety of encounters and personal anecdotes, as well as through wide reading in secular and theological engagements with digital media, Thompson persuades readers that the virtual world is most definitely real, a complex site in which people articulate their genuine joys and sorrows. Moreover, that virtual world never exists in some ethereal elsewhere but folds into our embodied material lives in countless ways. She demonstrates persuasively that “the often-intimate interrelatedness between virtual and actual worlds can together lead to better support and care not just for the soul and spirit but also for the body” as when the physician husband of a fellow religion professor in another state persuades Thompson to stay with a painful treatment regimen despite serious adverse reactions (67). In Thompson’s case, such virtual interventions proved not only to be consoling but life-extending.

Thompson’s book is good to think and live with for those of us who are both lured and repelled by life in the virtual world. Speaking personally—and Thompson’s vulnerability and candor demand that her readers respond in kind—I experience myself as a walking performative contradiction when it comes to the contrast between my digital life and life in “the real world.” As a Christian theologian who is also now a daily Buddhist meditator, I feel a keen and sometimes painful contrast between what I am training myself to do when I meditate and the tracks of time I loose on Facebook reading and sharing the news links and thought pieces my friends post. In the one case I cultivate capacities for sustained attention and in the other my capacities for focus seems to be dissipated. The capacities for focused attention that I seek to cultivate when I meditate bear little resemblance to my state of mind as I peruse article after article to the point of information overload, a kind of intellectual gluttony that is difficult to justify even if it is done in the name of finding a small measure of political agency in the time of Trump.

Thompson’s volume is helpful and promising precisely because she does not write with the uncritical enthusiasm of a new convert who can see nothing awry about her new religion for fear that critical vision may prove disillusioning. Throughout the book and particularly in chapter 4, Thompson confronts with sober clarity the hard truths of our ever-increasing distraction, dissipation, and even addiction in this digital era. She recognizes the many dangers and pitfalls that come with our new and increasingly all-consuming love for our digital devices. She challenges our propensity for either-or thinking—either the virtual world or the real world, either the virtual is all good or all bad—and calls instead for nuanced theological discernment. She appeals to the work of Jason Byassee and others to argue that Christians must “neither baptize the digital revolution nor reject it” (88). This posture of nuanced judgment will strike readers as exactly on the mark.

What is special is how thoroughly theological she is in generating the criteria for exercising such discernment: can skillful and attentive engagement with digital media tangibly help those among us who are the weakest? Can we engage in cruciform care for others in the virtual world? Thompson persuasively argues that we can and therefore must.

Is the Virtual Body of Christ Interreligious?

As I am a comparative theologian, Thompson’s ruminations are especially compelling because throughout her book, from start to finish, she resolutely seeks to think through the numerous interreligious ramifications that arise from this digitization of our relationships, this virtual constitution of the body of Christ. Thompson narrates any number of occasions in which the sustaining love that she received came from those who are not Christians, including Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews. Are these persons in their work of love and care part of the virtual body of Christ? Thompson wisely refrains from such naming. Instead, she considers those who belong to this interreligious community of solidarity and prayer part of “the communion of saints who have borne witness to my suffering and cared for the weakest in their midst” (108).

But in other cases, Thompson falls into an appropriate unknowing. When a Jewish friend prays for Thompson by placing a prayer into the Wailing Wall, she is clear that her friend is caring for a Christian in a Jewish way. When that same friend enters Christian churches in Israel and prays now to Jesus, a prayer offered for Thompson but without any intention of conversion, Thompson does not know how to name this moment. Thompson writes, and here we must quote her at length,

While this friend also prayed regularly for me at her synagogue, her literal adoption of a prayer stance of a religious other, not to mention directing her prayers to one her tradition does not regard as divine, requires a somewhat different response to whether or not my friend who is Jewish was, during these moments of prayer, part of the body of Christ. If participation in the body of Christ requires ascent to belief in the trinitarian God and the seal of the cross of Christ in baptism, then clearly my friend is outside the bounds of that vision of the body of Christ. If, however, a vision of bounded openness of the body of Christ includes space for those religious others who voluntarily enter that space and participate in particular bounded practices and thereby embody the command to specially attend to the weakest among us, it seems possible for me to claim her, however briefly, as part of an expanded version of the body of Christ. (109, emphasis original)

The care that Thompson takes in honoring the otherness of her friend’s faith commitments while nonetheless struggling to understand her friend’s voluntary and temporary boundary crossing, mediated to her and for her from across the globe, is an exercise in patient and subtle theological deliberation. She concludes that her friend’s “act is more an act of religious boundary crossing for the sake of the neighbor in need. It is a selfless, cruciform act for the sake of a friend” (109).

Whereas Thompson borrows theologian Serene Jones’s language of “bounded openness,” I prefer a slightly different though related metaphor: porosity. I have in mind the membranes of living cells and tissues that admit a vital flow of energies and substances, membranes that become impermeable and fixed only in rigor mortis. Vitality and permeability require and presuppose each other. Thompson presses a key question about the virtual body of Christ: how porous and even interreligious can the virtual body of Christ be? Thompson’s question is a vital one that should felicitously trouble every ecclesiological undertaking in an interreligious era.

Christian theologians have lately begun to explore one aspect of the interreligious question: the double belonging or multiple religious participation that increasingly characterizes the lives of many Christians who commit themselves, sometimes quite rigorously, to practices of yoga and Buddhist meditation. Even here, the literature is only just now gaining in quantity and quality. But Thompson knows that she is asking another question that asks not what Christians are doing when they cross over, but what non-Christians are doing when they take up Christian practices. What are we to make of those from other religious communities who participate in the corporal works of mercy and hospitality to which the Christian community is called by virtue of discipleship to Jesus the Christ? How to recognize and honor how “Christian” such works of love are—especially when they are done in the name of Christ—and yet without surreptitiously baptizing religious others who in no way intend to convert?

Thompson’s line of interrogation calls to mind others like Mahatma Gandhi who was perfectly willing to call himself a disciple of Jesus albeit a resolutely Hindu one, one moreover whose familiarity with and practice of nonviolent suffering love was explicitly inspired by the careful study of Christian scriptures, most notably the Sermon on the Mount, often with Christian readers. It is noteworthy that Gandhi’s interreligious ashram community routinely included the prayerful singing of Christian hymns. Were his interreligious ashrams also part of the virtual body of Christ? Here we venture a conclusion that would not surprise Thompson in the least: perhaps the body of Christ has always been porous well before that porosity was amplified by new virtual and digital modes of participation.

First, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Deanna Thompson for composing this book by means of weaving together her own experience of suffering and healing with theology and a keen examination of digital culture. In proposing her thoughts from this particular perspective, her approach resonates deeply with that of pastoral theology, which is my field of expertise. I am happy to add another resource to my bookshelf that can serve my teaching. I also would add a note of appreciation about her goal to invite ministers and pastoral leaders to consider digital culture anew and from a more constructive standpoint. This too is music to my ears and I join her with my own deep commitment to this approach.

Among the many interesting points made in The Virtual Body of Christ, I have selected two with which to enter into deeper conversation. The first point appears at the end of the first chapter (23f.) in the section where Dr. Thompson makes the case for her use of the word “virtual” as the term to describe the digitally mediated communication and interaction that can take place online. I fully agree with Dr. Thompson’s overall point that we ought not persist in the now artificial distinction between “virtual” and “real” experiences; as she quotes Reed, “we are always in the ‘real world’ even when we’re also online” (24). Online experiences are still real experiences, embodied experiences and authentic experiences, even if they are differently mediated than being face-to-face. For pastoral theology and ministry, this is can be a revelatory point, and serve as a constructive starting place for thinking about serving people and being church in and through digital culture.

Where I would like to enter into dialogue with Dr. Thompson is around whether the term “virtual” is indeed the best one for inviting pastoral ministers into seeing the potential of digital communication, encounters, and interactions as real. What she seeks to define are real experiences that are digitally mediated, and therefore undeniably different in this sense but nonetheless bearing the potential to be authentic, truthful, meaningful and healing. This is a worthwhile question in and of itself. I wonder though if using the term “virtual” to describe this kind of experience shuts down the conversation with those in ministry before it can even begin, particularly those who express some hesitation or suspicion about digital culture (which are many of our ministers.) “Virtual,” to those who hear the word without having studied its connotations in depth, evokes the mental images well noted by Dr. Thompson: VR simulators, Second Life, or simply something that is de-facto contrasted with actual reality or real life (24–25). Dr. Thompson builds on Reed and Boellstorff to deconstruct this stereotype.

For reaching those in ministry, the language of “virtual” may not be the most effective. Even though Dr. Thompson briefly suggests an intriguing connection between virtual and virtue on p. 26, I generally perceive the term virtual as outside of the comfort zone and ministerial vocabulary of the average church leader or minister. Therefore, my concern is not with the overall meaning that Dr. Thompson is communicating in this section, but rather with the term itself as not the best term to engage and entice ministry audiences to look closely and more constructively at digital culture.

I am still searching for the perfect alternative to propose, but I do sense that it would have to be a term already within or friendly to theological or ministerial vocabulary. From my own Roman Catholic theological tradition, I see a lot of potential in this regard in the term “mediated” as opposed to “virtual” to convey a reality that is communicated differently than a face-to-face interaction. “Mediated” is a term that carries theological meaning, and the kind of theological meaning that is especially enriching for thinking about digital communication as a whole. Mediation is a fundamental principle in the theology of revelation (God’s self-communication to humankind), in understanding Christ’s role and identity as the Son of God and Son of Man, and in the operation of divine grace as bestowed on humankind. More specifically to Catholic theology, mediation is a key concept for understanding the liturgy, sacraments, and Christ’s real presence in and through these, especially the Eucharist. Mediation, put in simplest terms, is a theological concept that ponders how divine grace and presence touches, imbues and transforms that which is not divine.

From our theological tradition, we therefore have a foundation for thinking about something being “mediated.” The history of human communication also adds its own particularities to this term, but these are not necessarily at odds with the theological meaning. After all, theology of mediation is also founded on communication, the self-communication of God. When we think about how presence is conveyed through a letter, print or the screen, we are thinking within the same ballpark of questions that ponder the mediated presence of God in our concrete, finite and limited reality. To label communication in our digital culture as “mediated” or “digitally mediated” therefore roots the question in theological soil, and makes the conversation friendlier and more inviting to those in ministry. There is a theological stability to the term “mediated” that can be more useful than “virtual” when encouraging and empowering our churches to go and proclaim the good news in and through these new digital spaces. I look forward to Dr. Thompson’s thoughts on this, as she indeed uses the term “mediated” briefly in a quote from Horst and Miller on p. 26, although the meaning there is less constructive than the theological approach I propose here.

The second point I would like to note comes from chapter 3, “Incarnational Living in the Digital Age,” in which Dr. Thompson explores the role of the body vis-à-vis presence and place, and how this is possible in digital communication. She masterfully illustrates the weighty and undisputable role of the body through an unflinching description of her own illness. She also raises the salient point that pastoral presence offered to those experiencing illness is a difficult matter: we are called to offer it as a basic corporal work of mercy, but it can be difficult to even impossible, evoking complex emotions in both minister and patient. From the perspective of pastoral theology, I appreciate the suggestion that digital presence extended to a person suffering illness ought to be at least on the menu of ways we extend pastoral care to the sick. A compelling reason for this is empowerment of the patient to maintain some boundaries and agency during the experience of illness. Just like it is prudent and pastorally sensitive to ask a patient permission to enter their hospital room (or home), or to discern whether it is better to telephone or to plan for a face-to-face visit with a person in grief, it is likewise prudent and pastorally sensitive to give a person with illness a choice in terms of how they wish to be present to the ministry worker. It is one of the few choices they can indeed make in the context of their suffering, as it is a choice that retains and communicates their dignity. Extending a mediated ministry presence can legitimately be one of the options a person chooses along these lines.

An invitation I would pose to Dr. Thompson is to elaborate on the other half of the Incarnation equation, specifically on the Word becoming flesh. (She does a great job on the flesh part.) I offer this invitation because one of the most compelling lines in her book, which comes early on, describes the virtual space as a space where she could “begin to share the particularities of [her] story [which] proved a vital tool to help [her] create a narrative of the suffering and upheaval metastatic breast cancer forced into [her] life” (5–6). The function of the word in interplay with the flesh is a profound aspect of this sentence. In a sense, narrating her suffering through digital conversations was an incarnational experience that not only acknowledged the body but provided hope, healing and meaning. In the context of virtual spaces, this was done in and through her word, through the narration of her experience. I see an experiential statement here with deep resonance with the theology of the Incarnation.

Returning to chapter 3, I would like to see the life-giving and meaning-making function of the Word find a place next to the case she makes for the importance of the body, particularly as we think about Christ, the Logos and Christ, the Incarnate Word, and what this implies for the theological relevance of communication. In the context of the Incarnation, Word and body are intimately intertwined, and animated by the Spirit. How can we discern Word and Spirit then in spaces that are mediated, virtual or differently embodied than face-to-face communication? We must acknowledge here precedence in the Christian tradition, such as the way the letters of Paul or other words of Scripture reveal Word and Spirit. This leaves us with the question of the potential of other media (such as digital) to do the same, to what extent, and in what ways.

I am looking forward to Dr. Thompson’s further reflections on these and other points.