The Incarnation and the Digital Age
The medium is the message
Christmastime is a season of giving when we celebrate the greatest gift given to humankind: Christ incarnate. The doctrine of the incarnation carries special resonance for our digital moment. The truth that God would choose to cast off his infinite potentials to enter into our particulars—a place and time experienced in a body—carries tremendous implications for how we ought to live in the world today. Transcendence, his church should understand, and the salvation of our souls is not a benefit of human effort via technological innovation but is rather a gift of God’s grace granted to us when we put our faith in the one who overcame our greatest obstacle—death—by submitting himself to it in the body.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “The medium is the message,” is important for understanding what makes the incarnation such a potent doctrine for our day.1 Neil Postman, in his seminal 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, uses this concept to explain how the television, America’s primary mode of communication in the 1980’s, has conditioned the American public to value what the television renders important: conciseness, visible charisma, aesthetic appeal. Thus, our politics, institutions, and religion are transformed into something conducive to a television screen. America, in essence, became one big television show.
McLuhan believed that while people tend to raise havoc over the content of our messages, the medium by which those messages are communicated prove far more critical. It is valuable to assess many of the recent digital innovations with his ideas in view: What does ChatGPT compel us to value? In what way will virtual reality transform how we view the world? But what I find more significant is what his insights reveal about the wonders of the incarnation.
The danger we face living in a technological society is that our most powerful devices tend to reorient our values. In his essay Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, Wendell Berry writes this:
More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind — the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines — and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.
A world dominated by machines tends to scorn the body for its inability to keep up with mechanical standards. Andy Crouch warns that as we continue to advance technologically, “rather than actually creating machines that understand the infinitely creative and complex world of human culture, we will find that it is far easier to create attenuated cultural environments that treat persons like machines.”2 It is, indeed, far easier to contort our bodies into the likeness of our machines than to create machines which understand the marvelous, mysterious, and at times frustrating elements of living in an embodied world.
While examples of this point are manifold, one prescient example of how this can be seen today comes from Freya India’s Substack essay, “Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear For Gen Alpha.” In it, she examines how Instagram’s algorithms have compelled countless young girls to transform their faces—through lip injections, nose chiseling, Botox, and more—to conform to an unattainable online beauty standard. Writing about Gen Z, she says, “We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.” The medium is the message. The medium seeks to conform the world, including our bodies, into its own likeness, if only we’d let it.
In the Greek myth, Prometheus gives humanity fire. But in God’s story, the human body is God’s chosen medium of grace. God did not extend to humankind the offer of salvation and healing by giving us some tool, some instrument, digital or otherwise, so that we could build our way to the heavens. Instead, he took on our very nature, together with all its finitude and limitations, so that he could restore fellowship with us through his body. In Jesus’ incarnation, God affirms the goodness of the physical world. In his life, Jesus dignifies our experience of the body, sufferings and all, and offers us healing. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus gives us the possibility of resurrection in our bodies, salvation, and transcendence. In his body, Jesus redeems our experience of the body and promises that we will ultimately overcome the evils to which our bodies have been subject if we put our faith in him.
If the body is God’s chosen medium of grace, the church should be wary about any technology that would lead us to despise the body for its limitations or else obscure our experience of it. While the world celebrates technological innovation as the means by which our society will overcome the problems of our age, we should subscribe to an alternative vision of flourishing—one that places its hope in the body and not the devices our bodies create. If God put on a body in our midst, submitting himself to the weakness, suffering, need, wonders that our physical nature entails, we should do the same for one another, believing that the “life that is truly life” is not a life lived escaping the body, but one lived fully in the body. That means we should make every effort to enrich our physical experiences—through health and fellowship—as opposed to our digital ones and learn to expect communion with God there.
This Christmas, perhaps the greatest gift that the church has to offer the world is embodied presence—with each other and with the one whose presence is himself our salvation. That means surrendering up our devices, questioning the transient impulses of our age, and instead investing deeply in the particular places, times, and people where God has planted us. But more so that means marveling at the child Christ. If God saw something about the physical world that was worth entering into and saving, we should become a people committed to seeking that beauty. Certainly, the world is replete with wonders, if only we’d slow down enough to see and savor what God has made.
"You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord’s renown, for an everlasting sign, that will endure forever."
-Isaiah 55:12-13
Originally introduced in his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
p. 97.