Techno community

Taking his thoughts from Trinity Sunday, and the way God has determined to share his love in embodied humans in community, Mark Galli writes,

Every technology has the ability to enhance embodied life or to subvert it. Take transportation. Planes, trains, and automobiles allow us to enjoy embodied fellowship with people who live far away from us. This is a great good. But speedy, cheap transportation also makes possible the transient culture we live in, where people struggle to put down roots in one place and ground themselves in their neighborhood...

...Not a few of us find ourselves addicted to email. It is a wonderful thing to be able to connect with so many people so quickly and efficiently. But like many, I often find myself so drawn to my Blackberry and laptop that I fail to be present with the flesh and blood person who is standing before me. I look at them and pretend like I'm listening, but my mind strains to get back to my email. The technology is obviously undermining my ability to be present in an embodied way to the real person in front of me.

Mark Galli, Christianity Today

Trinity and individualism

Tim Chester's comments on how we balance the one and the many, how we maintain both individualism and community without losing either, are very helpful. Everything relates to the Trinity:

If a society organises itself around individual consumer rights alone or diminishes mutual obligations then it impoverishes its members.

This individualism has its seeds in Augustine’s focus on the human mind as that which best reflects the image of God within us. A century after Augustine, the Christian philosopher, Boethius, formed what proved to be an influential definition of a person as “an individual substance of rational nature”. This comes to fruition in René Descartes’ declaration that “I think, therefore I am.” A person is a solitary, rational individual. But if what makes me human is my rationality or my rights or any other supposedly universal characteristic of humanity then it is difficult to say what makes me unique. “If you are real and important.., as the bearer of some general characteristics, what makes you distinctively you becomes irrelevant.”(Colin Gunton) I am lost in the mass of humanity.

But if relationships define my humanity, then it is a different story. The matrix of relationships of which I am part are unique to me. The role I play within them defines my distinctiveness. "Everything ... is what it uniquely is by virtue of its relation to everything else." But, because I am defined by relationships, this uniqueness does not lead to a solitary, fragmented existence. We find ourselves by being related to others, not by distancing ourselves from them. We find ourselves in giving and receiving. We are neither wholly the active subject of individualism nor the passive object of collectivism. "The heart of human being and action is a relationality whose dynamic is that of gift and reception."(Gunton)

'When marriages and parenthood are deficient in love and its generous self-expression and self-giving, and when our old, sick, handicapped poor or disadvantaged are ignored and unhelped, then the life of the triune God is not reflected in our humanity as it should be; then personhood itself is wounded and reduced. Where recognition of others, where kindness, gratitude and care are lacking, the person who has left these behind, however successful in other respects, has shrunk not grown in terms of their true person-hood. They are diminished, not greatened, in their self-sufficiency.' (Peter Lewis)

Tim Chester "Delighting in the Trinity", 166,167