Mediation and Grace: The Possibility of Christian Community in Digital Culture

I carefully readjust my posture, hoping to see and be seen clearly. The person speaking needs to adjust his microphone, and it’s distracting me. I see the woman in her frame, and she appears frozen. But I swear I saw her move; I’ve seen her move before. The speaker drones on, and I feel the smoothness of the wood in front of me under my fingers. The woman, I notice, looks smooth too, and though she is far from me, somehow the smoothness I touch connects me to her.

Virtual meetings have so dominated our lives over the past few months that what I have described may resonate with many, from schoolchildren to CEOs, all tethered to their computers during the pandemic. But the woman in her frame, frozen, was Mary, the Mother of God, and I was still in elementary school. She stood, frozen, carved out of wood, in a box far behind the lectern at my parish. I often stared past the lector, who too often needed to readjust the microphone, and onto the gentle face of that wooden Mary. My small hands gripped the pew in front of me, and I remember wondering if the wood she was made of was the same as my pew. Perhaps it was then that I fell in love with the rich system of religious mediation, knowing on a level so deep that only decades later would I find the theological vocabulary to convey that it is only through and by means of stuff that we encounter grace.⁴²

Mediation is about distance, and we have had time this year to ponder distance. That which is mediated is that which is distant from us, and whose distance we hope to close. Mediation, therefore, is also about closeness, insofar as it is the product of our desire for closeness in the face of distance. Sometimes we fight against mediation, insisting on immediate experiences as the “real” stuff of life—as if immediacy is somehow truly possible. Ironically, our desire for immediacy results in an explosion of media, or hypermediation.⁴³ Maybe we don’t need all this stuff, we surmise, inexplicably confident in our own ability to close the distance between creature and Creator.

Mediation reminds us of this failure; it reminds us of our finite creatureliness and our distance from God, one another, and from creation. Yet our frustration with distance supersedes our hesitancy for mediation, and we build, create, and innovate. We feel the yawning chasm between us and God, between one another, between us and our earthly home, and we long to close the distance—to make that which is absent from us, present to us. We do this because it is in our nature, but we also do this because it is God’s way revealed in Jesus Christ.

I offer this theological framework of mediation as a foundation for our discussions of all things digital, especially in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic. By operating with this framework, we can avoid reductionist and instrumentalist thinking about technology that often leads to unhelpful and unhopeful “hot takes” about the relationship of the church to its digital milieu. The pandemic has made digital culture and technology a new interest for many people in the church. It is thus an opportune moment to be very clear about the temptations we face in addressing this topic theologically, and to be candid about what a new reliance on digital technology has illuminated about the present state of the church, for better and worse.

The rather dramatic and swift move to digital platforms for many typically “offline” activities has forced many people to reflect more critically on our technological moment. As we begin to move back “offline”—God-willing—for some activities, we may be tempted to overstate our preference for the offline version by using the categories of the “real” and “virtual” to do so. This temptation is especially strong within the church: Christians like to offer the local church community— the congregation, the parish—as really real community in contradistinction...