Transcendent God, and the Technology He Created
It has been about 3 weeks since I've had to go to the office for work. Schools here in South Korea have been closed, and businesses experienced lulls. There has been a little panic buying but mostly in the mask department. Nothing I wanted to buy except masks has been in short supply. I was even able to receive relatively efficient and careful health care from my doctors who all had screening for people before they were examined to see if they had a fever etc. Almost suspected cases of covid-19 have be routed to designated testing centers separate from general practice hospitals, and then carefully quarantined.
Despite the availability of goods and services some social isolation was requested by the government. Many churches here in South Korea have obeyed the government's suggestions and have gone to online streaming. In my home country of Canada too, many churches are going to online streaming to help with social distancing. Being somewhat isolated from my brothers and sisters in Christ, it has been an amazing experience to see God transcending time and space through the Internet to bring pastors' messages to their people. This has gone on for some time now in many various media. Most pastors at least have audio recordings of their sermons, but this March I was struck by the power of video, and not just any video but live video.
I certainly felt a more of a connection with my fellow believers than just watching the same sermon isolated. On Facebook and YouTube platforms there are live chat features that allow people to interact during the live event. What a great and unobtrusive way to respond to a sermon. I was able to type my "Amen" discretely in the chat bar that can be closed if others don't want to be distracted.
The mediated nature of my experiences the past few weeks have got me thinking about what it means to be transcendent. God is ubiquitous. During this pandemic I was reminded that the God who foreknew and enabled people to create something of the Internet was intending it to point back to him as the omnipresent God. God is everywhere, and everywhen.
When we think about the strange way the Internet plays with our perception of time, it makes us wonder how it can even exist. It is in a certain way surreal or unreal. The timeline flow of Twitter will always be steps ahead of us so that we will always miss something, but not so for God. He foreknew every tweet. The massive amount of Facebook posts, or Instagram photos that we scroll by are continuously refilled by new content from around the world, and to us it seems endless, but not to God. The power of the Internet to transport experiences of sound, and picture across time and space seems almost like magic, but not to God. To God the internet is a finite thing he knows by direct knowledge. He knows all of it all at once, from its inception to its destruction. The transcendent qualities of the Internet are pointers to, and yet constantly dwarfed by God's transcendence. No trans-humanist dream can save us from the heat death of the universe, but God can. He is the ultimate transcendence.
Despite the availability of goods and services some social isolation was requested by the government. Many churches here in South Korea have obeyed the government's suggestions and have gone to online streaming. In my home country of Canada too, many churches are going to online streaming to help with social distancing. Being somewhat isolated from my brothers and sisters in Christ, it has been an amazing experience to see God transcending time and space through the Internet to bring pastors' messages to their people. This has gone on for some time now in many various media. Most pastors at least have audio recordings of their sermons, but this March I was struck by the power of video, and not just any video but live video.
I certainly felt a more of a connection with my fellow believers than just watching the same sermon isolated. On Facebook and YouTube platforms there are live chat features that allow people to interact during the live event. What a great and unobtrusive way to respond to a sermon. I was able to type my "Amen" discretely in the chat bar that can be closed if others don't want to be distracted.
The mediated nature of my experiences the past few weeks have got me thinking about what it means to be transcendent. God is ubiquitous. During this pandemic I was reminded that the God who foreknew and enabled people to create something of the Internet was intending it to point back to him as the omnipresent God. God is everywhere, and everywhen.
When we think about the strange way the Internet plays with our perception of time, it makes us wonder how it can even exist. It is in a certain way surreal or unreal. The timeline flow of Twitter will always be steps ahead of us so that we will always miss something, but not so for God. He foreknew every tweet. The massive amount of Facebook posts, or Instagram photos that we scroll by are continuously refilled by new content from around the world, and to us it seems endless, but not to God. The power of the Internet to transport experiences of sound, and picture across time and space seems almost like magic, but not to God. To God the internet is a finite thing he knows by direct knowledge. He knows all of it all at once, from its inception to its destruction. The transcendent qualities of the Internet are pointers to, and yet constantly dwarfed by God's transcendence. No trans-humanist dream can save us from the heat death of the universe, but God can. He is the ultimate transcendence.
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