Centuries ago the Church had to do some hard theological and Biblical thinking about what it meant to say that Jesus was ‘the Word become flesh’ (Jn.1:14). For a while the idea was popular that Jesus didn’t actually become human, but that He only appeared to do so. Docetism (as the idea was known, from the ancient Greek work meaning ‘to seem’) felt there were strong reasons for holding this opinion. Among others was the idea that someone as immense as God couldn’t really be conceived of as ‘fitting into’ a human life; but also the old dualistic reservations about the superiority of the spiritual over the physical. It’s an old chestnut which you find articulated in the old Greek philosophers, and which all these years later we’ve still not quite managed to shake off.

You stumble across it every time physicality is undermined, or seen as in some sense less valuable, or less permanent than spiritual dimensions of life. The popular idea that life after death is less than physical (the spirit that carries on forever, freed from the body) falls into this category, as does the notion that the ‘real’ me is a spiritual reality that is ‘inside’ my body. As an aside, the immortalists’ idea that we might be able to upload ourselves into the ether and carry on living is just a technologically advanced way of making the same mistake.

All of this is miles away from the teaching of the Bible. Insofar as Christological question is concerned, the idea that Jesus wasn’t really human, but only God looking like He was human was dismissed as official heresy at the Council of Nicaea (325AD). It was considered to be at very heart of the faith to recognise the absolute integrity of Jesus’ incarnation, and the total authenticity of His humanity. The same dualism in thinking about ourselves is knocked into left-field when we consider what the Bible teaches about our physicality. Our body is an essential aspect of what we are. Our embodiment was crafted personally by the LORD (Gen.2:7), and is part of the creation that He declared to be ‘very good’ (Gen.1:31). And our future is a resolutely physical one - indeed perhaps MORE physical that this age, and this life. Our expectation is for resurrection, and the short time we are without a body (between our death in this age and our resurrection in the age to come) will be one overshadowed by a groaning and a longing for our resurrection bodies (II Cor.5:1-10).

Unfortunately, the simple fact that the catholic Church has officially declared something to be actual heresy, doesn’t stop people believing it. It probably should, but few of us are sufficiently familiar with the history of doctrine, the Bible’s teaching, or our own thinking to be as guarded as we should. Mixed with that is our cultural determination to reject ‘tradition’ and to disregard as irrelevant anything that was around before I was.

Which means that as in many arenas of life, our failure to listen to history condemns us to repeat its mistakes. And so this old heresy is knocking on the door of the Church once again, and is in danger of being welcomed in and invited to stay for tea!

To be fair, it has crept up on us, and we may well have felt that we had no choice. The Government’s guidance, drafted as it was to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, lead the Bishops to close Church buildings for worship for the first time in 8 centuries. Having lost the opportunity to gather physically for worship, we have moved online. And, we are assured, we have lost little and gained much. We are told that this is healthy, and perhaps even Spirit-led. Recent weeks have shown us how great online worship and mission can be! We’ve seen a 10-fold increase in ‘attendance’! Perhaps we don’t need to gather physically… perhaps we are on the cusp of a revolution in Church life. The Church is a ‘spiritual’ reality, and the institutional (read: physical, cultural, social) accretion is turning out to be a hindrance rather than a help.

And so the dualism that found expression in the Docetist’s teaching about Jesus all those years ago, is now finding expression in our thinking about Church and worship. Historically it has been the incarnational life of the Son that was undermined, now it is the ‘incarnational’ life of the Spirit. We cannot separate the physical and spiritual life of the Church without critically impoverishing her Spiritual experience. It is just bad theology (read: heresy) to suggest otherwise.

The notion that the Church can manage online is a fatal error. We may see that elsewhere in the world the Church has no option but to survive in this emaciated state. Persecution, open hostility, and outright violence leaves many believers isolated and Facebook-fellowship is their only choice. But even in such situations our brothers and sisters go to breathtaking lengths and take huge risks to meet with other believers in real space and time. Instinctively we know they are missing out on something precious, and the fact that others endure such an impoverished experience of Church life should break our heart, cause us to weep for them in prayer, and renew our support for them. It should not inspire us to squander our Blood-bought privilege of being part of a congregation. A Scriptural theology of Creation, Incarnation, and Redemption militates in every way against the Docetic nonsense that the Church loses nothing in going virtual.

Marginalizing Sacraments and imagining that we can reduce praise, confession, intercession and the read / preached Word, and fellowship to something that is just as effectual when digitally delivered is to fundamentally mis-understand the nature of the Body of Christ, and the life of the Spirit. If these things were even partially true, person to person contact where believers are gathered in Christ’s name would become merely and optional extra for Christians.

But we worship a God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His Trinitarian nature has colossal implications for what we mean when we say we were created in His image… in the Image of a God who has inter-Personal relationship built into the very structure of His being. The image of God in humanity is neither individualistic, nor virtual, but finds expression in a covenantal relationship. Because God is Triune and in eternal personal relationship, the image of God is inescapably social in us. We can no more have an individualistic virtual church than we can have a virtual and individualistic marriage. We cannot be vitally connected in this way if we are in fact only virtually connected. There is simply too much in the life of the Church that is lost when it is abstracted into the ether.

As grateful as we should be for advancing technologies that assist communication, we are increasingly aware of how our spiritual isolation is taking its toll. Even after only a few months of ‘lockdown’ we are looking forward to meeting together in whatever format we can. The preached Word is not digital, the sacraments are not virtual and their faithful administration presupposes a congregated body of faithful believers. So let’s do away once and for all with this deeply ingrained dualism and its tendency to view the outer cultural world of material life and ‘flesh’ as a lesser domain in creation, whilst seeing the inner ‘spiritual’ and invisible life of the ‘soul’ as higher, or more ‘real’.   Christians should never be hoodwinked into undermining the physical, social and cultural aspects of our being, or of our discipleship.  Our ‘inner’ life is not separated from, still less does it trump, the reality of an embodied created world. This is as true for us as a Church as it is for us as individuals. When spiritual and physical are separated we are impoverished in being.