First this: There will be a major spoiler for the book Ready Player Two (sequel to Ready Player One, as if you couldn’t tell) by Ernest Cline in this post. If you don’t want the end of the book spoiled, don’t read further. If you have already read the book, don’t plan on reading it, or don’t mind a spoiler that doesn’t deal with the main plot line but is still significant, then read on.
Central to the world created by Ernest Cline is a virtual reality hub known as the OASIS in which much of humanity spends much of their lives, living virtually through their computerized avatars. Ready Player One was a wild romp through the OASIS and 1980s culture on a winner-take-all Easter egg hunt. As someone who spent his teen years in the ’80s, it was a blast.
In Ready Player Two, right from the outset, virtual reality makes a significant upgrade with the advent of direct-to-brain neural interfaces which remove any sense of unrealness from virtual reality. Using an ONI headset, your consciousness inhabits the full experience of other consciousnesses. I could record my experience of eating an apple and you could replay my experience and enjoy that apple through my specific taste bud sensations.
The use of these ONIs sets the scene for Ready Player Two. What we discover through is that when you use an ONI, you’re entire self is downloaded, duplicated, and backed-up at that moment. (The tech here is absurd, but that’s a whole other issue. Science fiction is really about answering the question, “What if this were possible? What would happen next?”) What we’re left with is autonomous non-corporeal entities: people without bodies. Ernest Cline thinks this would be heaven. There would be no more sickness, pain, hunger, death (hmm, starts to sound a bit like Rev. 21).
But is this actually heaven? Because just a little thinking about it makes me believe it’s a lot more hellish than any lake of fire the Medieval mind could conjure up.
In his brilliant little book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis imagines a bus trip to the edge of heaven by some denizens of hell. Heaven is that realm where the closer you get to the center, the more real everything becomes. Hell, on the other hand, is that realm where everyone moves farther and father apart and things become less and less real, less tangible. In hell, you can erect any gaudy mansion for yourself, but it can’t keep out the rain.
Cline’s eternal digitized being sure sound to me like they’re trapped in a world of unreality and will go mad knowing it’s not real. Sure, those experiences they’re plugging into were real experiences of real people when they were recorded, but they aren’t any more. They may “feel” real, but there’s always the knowledge that you’re really just plugged into some kind of Matrix and none of these experiences are real at all, because none of them are yours. Well, that’s not completely true. You possess all of your memories which you can reinhabit as often as you desire. But how desirable is that, really? Again, in The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines Napoleon reliving Waterloo over and over again for eternity. If we’re honest, it’s not our best moments that draw us back for repeated viewing, is it? It’s our worst moments that we obsess on. And do we really want to replay them in full sensory experience over and over again. (And would a good sexual experience end up just being unfulfilling porn if revisited?)
Cline’s view of a post-body humanity is nothing new. Science fiction writers have toyed with the idea for decades. I remember watching an original series Star Trek episode where the crew of the Enterprise encountered a race of beings who had become pure energy. It was supposedly the end goal of evolution. But I kept thinking, “That would be the most boring thing ever!” It’d be as boring as the common misconception about heaven as people floating around on clouds playing harps.
Yes, our bodies are the scene of our greatest shames and pains and struggles.
Bodies are where we suffer sickness and pain and ultimately death. In the meantime, many of our sins would be impossible without bodies. Lust. Violence. Racism. Sexism. Gluttony. Drunkenness. And so on. In the hospital, I see the end result of the lives people have lived, addicted to drugs, addicted to food. According to doctors and nurses who work there, at any given time, more than half of the people in the ICU are there because of lifestyle choices. We bear in our bodies the damages we cause to ourselves by living in bodies.
But our bodies are also the scene of our greatest glories and joys. Without bodies, there is no beauty. None.
It takes eyes to see a landscape. It takes ears to hear a piano sonata. It takes taste buds to enjoy the tang of red ripe raspberries in the spring. It takes a body to thrill in athletics. And only those who have bodies would ever delight in these things. They wouldn’t make sense to disembodied spirits. Enjoying the bubbles and amber coloring of an imperial IPA as it is poured into a glass is a purely physical sensation, as is sipping it and letting the bitter and sour and sweet mingle on the tongue, one flavor replacing another in sequence and then lingering together.
The biblical notion of being a human person doesn’t divide soul from body as the Greek notion did.
We don’t have bodies. We are bodies. There is no psycho-somatic split. We are integrated human beings.
This is why the Scriptures and Christian theology are adamant about the resurrection of the body. There is no “heaven” without our bodies. There is no incorporeal afterlife. Yes, our bodies will be changed. But that change is an end to our corruption and a fitness for life in the Spirit. Those references to “spiritual bodies” in some translations of 1 Corinthians 15 are simply bad translations. Instead of “spiritual,” they should read “of the Spirit.” Where we currently struggle between body and Spirit/spirit, that struggle will cease in the life to come. We will finally be fully at home in our bodies and fully at home as full participants in the life of God. (No, I’m not saying we’ll be God. But we will be able to step into the life God shares within himself as Trinity.)
Our bodies are not unfortunate.
Yes, at times they can be tragic. But they are beautiful and glorious and a gift from the Creator who knew what he was doing when he made them and gave them as he was making each of us. Their idiosyncrasies are part of their wonder and joy. While I think hair on others is beautiful, I have fully embraced my baldness. And if you know me, it’s hard to think of me with hair. My body is an expression of who I am in relationship with you. I am not an idea or digits in a computer. I inhabit space and time. I am real. I have a body and always will.
And because of that, I will continue to reject the bodiless eschatologies of science fiction writers like Ernest Cline and impoverished eschatologies of those who envision clouds and angel wings (and NO, WE DO NOT BECOME ANGELS!) and thin piped in music no self-respecting elevator would ever play.
St. Paul had no virtual reality headset when he penned the words, “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). He believed his life in the body was filled with goodness and that the resurrected life after this one ends would also be filled with goodness. All of it would be filled with Christ and thereby filled with Glory (yes, with a capital G).
World without end.