In addition to these issues, theologians are also concerned—primarily as teachers and academics—with the changing loci of authority with regard to all knowledge. According to Bennett, “We cannot see distinctions between ourselves and God when ‘attaining knowledge’ has been truncated to the phrase ‘Let me just Google that.’”39 This inability to distinguish between ourselves and God, according to Bennett, should help us understand how to name the internet as one of the Powers and Principalities referenced by the New Testament. As a Power, Bennett argues, “the internet is one of many social structures which affects our ability to follow Jesus well.”40 Powers are created and therefore fallen.41 The fallenness of the internet is primarily in its ability, as a Power, to appear as what it is not. According to Bennett, “We humans are too prone to believing that we make institutions like the internet. But it is exactly in believing this that makes the Powers seem to have autonomy from God; thus they dominate and dehumanize humans by separating us, too, from God.”42 For Bennett, then, the way in which the internet inserts itself as an authority speaks directly to its being a Power, created and fallen, and ultimately set against the true authority of God.
Bennett, Miller, and Godzieba provide different theological perspectives on the relationship between the internet and authority. Bennett argues that as one of the Powers and Principalities, the internet sets up its own authority against the true authority of God, and presumably against truth and knowledge of which God is the source. Miller argues that the internet contributes to the commodification of religion by refocusing culture onto identity, thereby disrupting the traditional structures by which magisterial authority is interpreted. Godzieba argues that “digital immediacy” contributes to a centralization of ecclesial authority by flattening the hierarchy of truth by way of aesthetical form. Their perspectives highlight the dynamic relationship of the sites of authority to consumer culture, as well as the relationship between the church and the culture(s) in which it finds itself throughout history.43
The incarnational emphasis of these approaches with regard to authority is not as readily apparent as other aspects of the internet. In fact, the doctrine of the Incarnation offers a critical framework on this aspect only as it pertains to the doctrine of the church. In the discussions of authority above, the church provides the standard of organizational integrity and internal coherence, which it reflects only insofar as it is founded upon and sustained by Christ. An incarnational approach to the question of authority is one that understands the importance of mediating structures, the primary of which is the sacramental life of the church, lived out in local communities. The theological antidote to decentralized, unbounded knowledge proffered by the internet is the joining of oneself to a community with commonly held loci of authority given it by the author of life.
Access
The issue of authority in an online context is closely related to the issue of access. By “access,” I mean two distinct but related things. First, there is great concern over how easily we are able to access whatever we want online. Second, there is some concern about discrepancies in access between various groups of people. This is one of the most convincing theological concerns, as one who studies the internet cannot help but notice the degree to which it is centered on the experience of some in the world and ignores or excludes others. Political scientist Pippa Norris is a leading researcher on the so-called digital divide, which she divides into three types: global, social, and democratic.44 The global digital divide acknowledges differences in access between countries, correlated with differences in development generally. The social digital divide refers to the difference in access between rich and poor within a particular country. Finally, the democratic digital divide refers to differences in utilization of the internet among users.45
Bennett addresses the digital divide in its global form, saying, “Third-World peoples may end up feeling coerced by a world in which they cannot fully participate; colonialism emerges once again, this time in the guise of sleek machinery that promises to ‘connect us’ to a broader world, but in reality disconnects.”46 The problem of access in this respect falls mostly under the topic of development, deserving of a full theological treatment, and thus outside the scope of this project.
The other meaning of access is related Bennett’s discussion about attaining knowledge. Drawing on Graham Ward’s Cities of God, Bennett argues that knowledge and truth become “readily available to us in a variety of convenient interfaces that can be bought.”47 The argument rests in the assumption that the internet is primarily the place of search engines, the magical tools that bring to our eyes and minds whatever it is we call upon. Indeed, for Bennett, perhaps the search engine is best understood as the primary faculty by which the internet behaves as a Power, asserting itself as the locus of all knowledge, a poor substitution for the source of all true knowledge. The anxiety over access under this meaning appears in several other places, including Craig Detweiler’s iGods. According to Detweiler, “Our machines offer us more access and more computing speed at more affordable prices every day.”48 He assumes throughout his text that “we are inundated by too much information (of our own making).”49
Detweiler’s argument goes on to be about both information and material goods. With regard to information, his example is, understandably, Google. According to Detweiler, “Google is guided by an ambitious mission statement—organizing the world’s information.”50 Like Bennett, Detweiler turns to Genesis for his theological account of this phenomenon. “If the original temptation in the garden was too much knowledge,” he writes, “then Google is flirting with ancient lures. The hunger for knowledge can evidently overtake us, taking God out of the center of the world and thereby decentering us.”51
The worry is over the way in which online habits are forming us as individuals and members of communities. For example, Philip Thompson uses the contemplative project of Thomas Merton “to challenge a technological mentality which is seeking to solve problems at hyper-speed and is justified by the mandates of expediency and efficiency.”52 He recognizes this technological mentality within himself and calls the need to be connected constantly to devices, “compulsive communication anxiety.”53 According to Thompson, “It illustrates how communication technologies can overwhelm our consciousness through an unceasing info-glut that may limit our most important interactions with family and friends.”54 He goes on to list many alarming examples of the negative effects of our “information age”: statistics about daily average screentime, the demise of print culture, isolation and the erosion of traditional sites for necessary “social development,” the growing number of children and adolescents on psychotropic medications, diminished reading comprehension among younger children, general memory loss after prolonged internet use, lack of sleep due to devices, and more.55 The list is staggering (if tenuous in terms of causality). All of these problems lead Thompson to conclude, “This communication environment is not particularly hospitable to ancient truths and religious practices.”56
There is a connection here between access to goods and information, and access to other human beings. The internet affords its users great access to knowledge, but it also provides access to other people. This access to others can take more than one form. It can be friendly communication with strangers or friends, or it can be accessing photos or words of another person within various contexts, most of which they curate themselves. In the latter case, the person can be removed from the moment of access, either consciously or unconsciously. For example, I can access someone else’s thoughts through her blog. She need not be present for me to access her words.57
Here we see the theological concern over the pernicious effects of a technologized existence. Critics such as Thompson operate with the correct assumption that there is something disturbing about the way in which our time online conditions us not only to desire but to expect things and even people to