Looking for the Resurrection of the Dead: The Starting Point for Finding the “Lost Boys”
[The following guest post from Ryan Davidson (a former deacon at MCPC) advances the conversation started by Samuel James and Carl Trueman regarding the “Lost Boys.” — Peter Wallace]
Looking for the resurrection of the dead may actually be the most important apologetic task set before the church today. Because in that hope is an affirmation of the reality of humans as essentially *embodied*. One’s body is not a cage to be escaped from or a restraint to be discarded. God made us with bodies, and it is only with bodies that true human flourishing is possible, in this life or the next.
I don’t have a linear argument here, just observations about three contemporary cultural phenomena which I believe are tied together in their denial of–or at the very least blindness towards–this fact of human nature. All of them have to do with the internet.
We’ll start with video games, because that’s where the “Lost Boys” article starts. I did not find the James piece compelling, but I must also register some dissatisfaction with some of Trueman’s analysis as well. Video games as an activity have their problems, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But there is definitely a sense in which a lot of the criticisms of video games could apply just as well to activities various authors find laudable. Chess is “only a game,” but it’s long been recognized as a “legitimate” intellectual past time. It produces no more concrete material benefits to its participants than video games do for theirs, but somehow it doesn’t tend to garner the same sort of criticism. To the extent that a person can spend too much time on video games (which one certainly can!), it would seem to me that one would have to say the same thing about chess. Only one doesn’t hear that argument made all that often. It may be that chess just isn’t all that popular, so it doesn’t get the same kind of attention from the commetariat. But I have to think the disparate treatment is also a function of *taste,* and I’m just not willing to credit any serious ethical distinctions which are founded upon taste.
Because there are definitely ways in which video games can be a positive component to healthy human communities, and these generally have to do with bringing people together in shared love of the same activities. For instance, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of people used video game consoles as party activities. Mario Kart. Goldeneye. The first Halo. Various Wii games even today. And the almost innumerable rhythm/music games, culminating with Rock Band. Up to four people could play these at once, and if you traded controllers almost a dozen people could be involved over the course of an evening. True, there are ways of spending an evening that are more beneficial in the long run, but there are also far worse things to do. The basic fact is that we’re talking about anywhere from two to a dozen people, all in the same room, having a good time together. If it’s a video game facilitating that, what of it?
Unfortunately, contemporary gaming culture has actually moved *away* from the things that made that possible. Multiplayer games are now almost exclusively played over the internet, with no two players ever being in the same room in most circumstances. So any communal camaraderie which might have emerged in the context of four-plus guys on a couch is *gone.* People act as if this is no different from having everyone in the same room, but it *is* different. It’s no longer something that four embodied human beings are doing in the same physical space. It’s something that four brains in jars could do just as well as actual people, and the experience is the worse for it. Only no one really seems to notice that, or if they do no one seems to think it’s a problem.
Related to that is the phenomenon of people describing online interactions as “communities.” I see more and more of this on YouTube, as content creators describe their subscriber bases as “communities,” sometimes extending that to the people that subscribe to a group of channels (e.g., channels devoted to gaming, baking, comedy, cosmetics, whatever). And they’re not limiting their meaning to purely the exchange of ideas about the subject matter. Academicians have long spoken of the “academic community,” but what I understand that to mean is limited to the development and advancing of particular academic conversations. Two scholars trading insights and/or blows on the pages of academic journals over a period of months or years, with others chiming in from time to time as appropriate. There’s certainly something to that, but in the academy anyway, no one seems to think that this is anything but professional. None of the participants view their interactions in that format as being of any personal, relational significance beyond the subject matter under discussion. But YouTubers talk about “being there for each other,” doing “great things” beyond the immediate subject at hand, supporting each other, etc. All the things one would expect to hear occurring, not to put too fine a point on it, in the local church. There is most certainly a place for exchanging ideas on the internet. But people are increasingly starting to view it as the equivalent of–even a *replacement for*–embodied communities.
I find this increasingly disturbing. These interactions necessarily exclude any real involvement with the participants’ bodies and are greatly impoverished for it. It doesn’t matter how emotionally satisfying one finds one’s interactions on an internet forum to be. Unless those relationships exist outside the internet, in “meat space,” as the cool kids say, none of those people are going to bring you a meal, bail you out of jail, stand in your wedding, watch your kids, call you for a ride to the airport, or basically provide any means of tangible, embodied support for you. The internet can act as an extra layer on top of existing relationships, but it cannot be a *substitute* for physical interactions in the real world. And people are treating it that way, often without even knowing they’re doing it.
Only some people *do* know that they’re doing it, which brings us to the third phenomenon: people at war with their own bodies. Now we’re talking some often deadly serious issues, e.g., the ongoing “gender identity” nonsense, body image issues, physical illness, more exotic/fantastical practices that even most internet natives find amusingly wacky. Less seriously, we’re talking about people who are just physically awkward/shy, who for whatever reason haven’t learned how to be comfortable in their own bodies, let alone around other people’s bodies. People like this often deliberately an consciously turn to the internet for the social connections they can’t/won’t/are afraid to make in person. This has a number of vicious effects, not least of which is the creation of echo chambers in which people with similar/related issues can talk to each other without any external, corrective input and, to quote a phrase, “glory in their shame.” I do not think it coincidence that the exponential rate at which LGBTQ issues went from unspoken, to spoken, to mainstream seems to have started right around the same time that the internet became widely available in the home. People identifying as LGBTQ have never represented more than a low single-digit percentage of the population, rendering it almost impossible for more than one or two people to get together in the same physical space outside of the largest cities, where the sheer scale of the population made it abundantly clear just how distinct a minority they were. All of that goes out the window on the internet. One can immediately connect with an arbitrary number of like-minded people, to the exclusion of all others, making it very easy to forget or even outright deny the validity or even existence of other viewpoints.
But my point here is not primarily political, as much as it is to call attention to the fact that a *lot* of people out there have *very* negative relationships with their own bodies, and the format of the internet permits an outlet for that kind of thing. Prior to the mid-1990s, anyone who wanted to talk to more than one person at a time really had to get out of the house and go do it. This necessitated interaction in the flesh, and even attempts to form affinity-based communities could not get around the brute facts of distance (limiting the number of people that could be involved) and the existence of other persons (whose presence cannot be denied when walking around downtown). I think this had two effects that prevented these issues from coming to the attention of both the church and the wider culture. First, because these people were so dispersed throughout the population, it was pretty easy to just ignore them as “that one guy.” Can’t really do that anymore. But second, and more positively, the mere fact that you just had to *go outside* forced a lot of people to deal with their issues, willy-nilly. When it is impossible, as a practical matter, to avoid the reality of one’s body, one either comes to terms with it (and moves on with one’s life) or doesn’t (see Oscar Wilde). Now, there are a ton of people out there who are not only refusing to deal with the fact of their bodies, but even starting to insist that they, as human persons, should not be subject to the physical fact of their bodies. They don’t *feel* like they’re male, they’re going to insist that you treat them as female, biology be damned. Or less militantly, people with body image problems can spend all of their time commiserating with other people with similar issues, allowing themselves to be consumed by that issue instead of basically growing up and moving on to other things.
I think that looking for the resurrection of the body has the potential to be an incredible counter-agent for these related phenomena. It requires us to insist that *humans* *are* *embodied.* We do not look to be “freed” from our bodies, as so many people (understandably!) do. But looking for the resurrection of the body also requires us to acknowledge the *brokenness* of the body. No, we do not seek to be “freed” from our bodies, but inherent in looking for resurrection is, or ought to be, an acknowledgment that it is just as possible to be at war with one’s body as it is within one’s soul. “Who will save me from this body of death?” is not *merely* spiritual, even though it certainly involves that. The church has the capacity, if it puts its mind to it, to directly engage these people’s hurts. We don’t really expect the sick to be healed in dramatic fashion anymore, but we *do* fully expect our bodies to be *restored.*
This is why I find James’s and even Trueman’s pieces to be do disappointing. Neither really seems to wrestle with the fact that so many people feel so disconnected from or even antagonistic towards their bodies. Which is sad, because such seems to be arguably explicit in Genesis 3, or at the very least strongly implied. It’s ironic really: in criticizing cultural phenomena that are fundamentally Gnostic in their denial of the importance or even the reality of the human body, neither author talks about the body seemingly at all!
I would hope the above would resonate fairly strongly with the work of James K.A. Smith out of Calvin. “Desiring the Kingdom” is one of the most important books I’ve read, highlighting how fundamentally *embodied* Christian worship is, most obviously in the sacraments, but even just in the fact of coming together in one room, breathing the same air, singing together, touching, moving, standing, sitting, all of the overlooked but essential elements of Christian liturgy. And of course, we can hardly leave this subject without a mention of the horrifyingly absurd phenomenon of “virtual church services,” up to and including the abomination that is the “remote” administration of the sacraments (BYO bread and wine).
All of which to say that I think that these phenomena revolve around a single issue, the fact of the human body, which the church is uniquely positioned to address. The church can and should counter these ways of ignoring or outright denying of the significance of the human body by not only drawing attention to the body by engaging humans as corporeal beings in its liturgies, but by offering the only thing that goes beyond mere amelioration of the pitfalls of our incarnation: the power of the resurrection. This, I believe, is the message contemporary culture is longing for. To paraphrase Smith, one cannot satisfy a fire in someone’s guts by pouring water on their head. People with adversarial relationships with their bodies do not need information. They need the bread and the wine–the Body and the Blood–as divinely empowered foretastes (in every sense of that word!) of the life of the world to come.
Ryan Davidson, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
