It’s good for people to think through this new territory and I understand the suspicion toward what is completely new. We should be suspicious. We should ask, Why is this new thing presented to us? Is it harmful or helpful?
I don't know what new thing Hodge has in mind. The electronic church isn't new. Jews and Christians have practiced physical fellowship for millennia. Christians have continued to worship during time of plague for centuries. Perhaps Hodge means his own understanding of the church.
No. I’ve tried to make this clear. The ideal is to be physically present with one another, but such is not the ideal because it is somehow more obedient to meet physically than meeting online in a time when the risk of physically meeting is assessed to be a greater threat than not meeting physically.
i) That, of course, is the stock excuse to suspend public worship. During times when it's deemed to be riskier to meet together than to avoid meeting together.
ii) One problem, as I recently noted, is that it's a matter of degree:
How risky is too risky? Does Hodge think there should be a moratorium on public worship until we develop a vaccine?
As I noted in another post, the ancient church didn't practice social distancing:
It is ideal because it provides a basic human component to human health, as Steve mentions below. But this is a basic human need that all humans, believer or unbeliever, have. I just believe it should be primarily met with other believers when possible. So if the church can meet physically in the same place without this threat, it should. Furthermore, when the church does again meet physically, anyone not doing so would be in sin, since they are not in submission to the elders nor partaking in a church that is meeting in all of the aspects of ministry I mentioned before. Along those same lines, watching Youtube videos or listening to podcasts alone is not meeting as the church online. Fellowship and all it assumes, the meeting of needs, spiritual and physical, must remain as essential components of the assembly.
So is it essential or just ideal?
Steve hasn’t referred to it with the word “sacrament.” That is true. However, when he speaks as though there is something supernatural or mystical happening due to our physical presence in the same place, as though a grace, a transformation, or a power is given to us through it, then this is, in fact, a sacramental idea. It isn’t biblical, but you can see how tradition has shaped our thinking, even if subconsciously. We think there is something mystical happening when we physically meet in the same place. But what does physically meeting in the same place do that meeting through some other means not do?
i) To begin with, it's revealing that Hodge has no categories for what I describe, so he substitutes categories like "sacramental" and "mystical" that I don't use. Classic examples of sacramentalism would be baptismal regeneration, penance, and reception of the real body and blood of Christ in the eucharist. But I haven't used those examples because I don't subscribe to that kind of sacramentalism.
ii) Another kind of supernaturalism would be something like xenoglossy, miraculous healing, prophetic insight and foresight. But I haven't used those examples.
iii) Take more mundane examples like answer to prayer. An answer to prayer is supernatural in the sense that it's something that wouldn't naturally happen. God must grant the petition. It may not be supernatural in a spectacular or sensational sense, but it's not just something that was going happened whether or not the prayer request was made. Does Hodge think answered prayer is "mystical"?
Another example is sanctification. That's supernatural, but it can use the means of grace. Ordinary public worship can facilitate sanctification.
Now, I would argue for the sacramental nature of the assembly as God’s temple, but as argued before, this is not limited by what geographical area we occupy. The church is the temple when they do not meet. The temple is enlarged when they do meet so that sacred space is enlarged to a greater geographical area. God’s life-giving glory/presence occupies and flows from sacred space. This is only magnified when meeting online, not diminished.Two things here. 1. Steve seems to be suggesting that we are becoming digitized ourselves, disembodied. We aren’t living in the Matrix. Everyone online is still embodied. Everyone meeting is still physical. I don’t how physical church gets for people, but I’ve never heard anyone make the argument that you did not go to church unless you physically touched someone. So what exactly does disembodied worship/fellowship look like?
It looks like the electronic church.
Have we been practicing it even when we do physically meet in the same room? Our physical brains engaged, our physical mouths take communion, our physical vocal chords sing, our physical tongues speak the truth. I’m one of the biggest adversaries toward gnostic thinking in our culture that I know of, but online worship is very physical and hardly disembodied.
He keeps missing the point of coming together for physical fellowship.
For some reason, Hodge is hung up on "geography". The primary principle is physical assembly. A common space is simply a necessary instrumental means to that end. It could be inside or outside, although weather can be a practical factor.
2. The problem with this line of argumentation is that it will eventually have to argue that Christ can’t join us in our worship/fellowship in the way that He should because He is not meeting with us physically but through the Spirit. Likewise, those in heaven can have no real worship and fellowship with Christ because they are spirits and disembodied at the moment. If embodied worship is a necessity, then they all are deficient in it.
i) There's a sense in which heaven (i.e. the intermediate state) is deficient. It's a temporary stopgap until the resurrection of the just.
ii) However, the comparison is off because, to judge by visions of heaven in Scripture, it's like a collective dream where the saints have simulated bodies and interact with each other as if they were embodied agents.
What does “physical interaction” mean? I agree that what is devoid of technology is natural, but confusing what is natural with what is ultimately good or ideal has implications on numerous things. If Christians must shun technology for the natural as an ethical good then we must all reconsider becoming Amish. What is natural is normative by necessity in a non-technical age, not something that is ideal. I see no biblical argument in suggesting otherwise. We sing together, have face-to-face interactions with one another online, so the only thing missing is physical touch. Is that actually necessary for fellowship? Have you not fellowshipped or gone to church until you physically touch someone? Does that mean that men should never fellowship or worship with women? Certainly, in church history, unmarried men and women did not touch one another in the assembly. I’m not sure that even married people did so. Does this mean they were all out of fellowship and had forsaken the assembly? Is it necessary to just touch one person or all of them? All joking aside, touch is a part of a physical need that Christians can provide for one another and should when they are able. It is not a necessary component of fellowship and worship though. If you are a leper, and it's not Jesus or an apostle with a healing gift you're reaching out for, please love people and keep your hands to yourself.
i) There are shutins who can't attend church. The electronic church will suffice for them, although they still require visitation ministry.
ii) Hodge trivialized the role of touch, but consider how much physical touch figured in the public ministry of Christ. Consider the role of touch in ecclesiastical prayer for healing:
iii) Embodied experience, embodied interaction are part of Christian worship, not in the first place because we're Christian, but because we're human, and so that's something we bring to the proceeding, whether inside church or outside church. That's just how God made us. It conditions our humanity.
iv) Physical interaction can mean many things. Eye-contact. Speaking face-to-face. Singing alongside each other. Praying in unison.
v) By Hodge/s logic, a married couple might as well conduct their marital life entirely through cellphones. They could raise their kids entirely through cellphones. No physical interaction required. Just the electronic voice and the image on the screen. Have domestic robots provide for the physical necessities while we communicate with our kids through cellphones.
That’s really not my argument at all. It was normative because it was the only way a church could meet together.
That just begs the question. Were conjugal relations never normative but just a temporary stopgap until we developed artificial insemination?
Nowadays you don't need to hug your kids or hold their hands or take them in your arms or give them piggyback rides if you have domestic robots can do that. You don't need to read to your kids. A computer can do that.
By Hodge's logic, there was never any intrinsic necessity in Christians meeting together for worship. Why bother with house-churches or the agape feast?
Now that isn’t the case. If by “normative,” Steve means “an essential component of the command” then my entire post refuted that idea. If it was normative then none of these things could be done by proxy, and they were even in the early church.
That's a non sequitur. The fact that some things can be done by proxy doesn't mean that's a permanent alternative. Is bottle-feeding preferable to breastfeeding? Is it preferable for able-bodied teenagers to use electric skateboards instead of using their own muscles to walk?
This is a new technology which allows for it in our day, which is really why what I am saying is so shocking to people. It simply is unfamiliar, and therefore, uncomfortable, not disobedient.
There's nothing unfamiliar or shocking about the electronic church. The question at issue is whether that should be treated as a normative substitute for physical fellowship.
Maybe I have an oddly Holy Ghostly view. LOL. Here we see again this idea that if one is communicating through video he is somehow disembodied. Does everyone who speaks to someone through a camera go out of their bodies? Is Steven suggesting again that some mystical thing happens through the physical body being present in the same geographical location with other physical bodies? Certainly, chemical things happen. This is why people like going to places where there are lots of other people. It’s why they like visiting friends and family. There is something very natural that happens, but I don’t see anything supernatural about it that only believers can fill.
Why did God institute public worship in the first place unless he reserves certain kinds of blessings for public worship? It's striking how Hodge trivializes the importance of the body in social interactions. Does he subscribe to remote control parenting where domestic robots do the hands-on stuff, the physical contact, while parents and children only interact via computers and cameras?
Again, is the communion digitized? Are we all eating gigabytes? No. We’re all eating physical bread and drinking physical wine while we meet and see one another’s faces as an elder conducts the communion ceremony. It remains a very physical thing we are doing with our physical bodies. We are all still connected because of the digital media.
This reminds me of Televangelists who instruct viewers to put their hands on the TV screen to receive healing.
Preaching has always been non-physical. The non-physical word is the medium through which we worship God and are transformed as His church.
Preaching has always been physical. I think what he means is that the message is abstract.
Sure, but my argument wasn’t about the economics of the localized church either. It was solely about whether believers are being obedient to their ministry by meeting online in order to protect the church’s members from plague.
But Hodge doesn't seem to think there's any spiritual benefit to physical fellowship. Certainly nothing to outweigh the alleged physical risk.
I never suggested expert opinion was monolithic, but the people equipped to disagree with experts are other experts, not some armchair experts who read a bunch of articles on the internet and watched Youtube videos that are contrarian to expert opinions.
i) But Hodge is very selective and one-sided about the experts he listens to. He's totally sold on the social distancing model. He shrugs off the herd immunity model. Or discriminating quarantine based on individuals who test positive.
ii) And what if the projections of the experts appear to be seriously inflated? The infection rate tells you something about the fatality rate. The problem as I understand it is an inverse relation between the percentage of infected in relation to the percentage of fatalities. The higher the "exponential" transmission rate combined with most of the inflected population not developing life-threatening conditions means the fatality rate is diminished/diluted in relation to the percentage of the population that's infected. If you have a higher percentage inflected, but that doesn't correlate with comparable death toll, then the pathogen is less dangerous.
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