Challies identifies a “new Gnosticism,” a way of life in which virtual relationships with mediated communication are preferred over real face-to-face relationships:
In The Soul in Cyberspace, Douglas Groothuis writes of a woman who suffers from a serious social phobia that has left her extremely anxious in social situations and, as a consequence, increasingly isolated and alone. But through the Internet she was able to find others who suffered from a similar condition, and together they have been able to interact and form a kind of community. Here they have found the friendship and fellowship that their conditions have denied them in the real world. Here, in a world without her body and all of its limitations, she has found a place to be herself.
But has this woman truly found freedom from the limitations of her flesh? There is a sense in which she has—she has been able to find a way of overcoming her inability to communicate. And yet, there is another sense in which she has not really found freedom at all because she is still bound by her condition, a condition that keeps her from finding and experiencing community in the real world. She is still a captive to the four walls that keep her from the world of flesh and blood. Cyberspace has provided a sense of community but has also furthered her captivity by giving her the illusion of freedom. That she believes she is now free from this limitation only shows just how captive she remains to its power. She has accepted the promise of Gnosticism—that life without the physical is as good or better than life within it. But this denies what the Bible tells us: “In the biblical teaching, matter is something not to be escaped but redeemed” [Groothuis]. Freedom without the body, freedom without what makes us whole and complete human beings, is really no freedom at all.
—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan,2011), 101–102.
This way of thinking is not exclusive to those, like the woman in the example above, suffer from abnormal phobias. If you are reading this post, chances are that you are among the millions whose communications are increasingly impersonal, mediated through email and text-message. We would be wise to consider the extent to which that is true, and examine ourselves to see if we prefer it that way.
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