Digital technologies blur the distinction between the real and the imaginary. The distinction is not a simple or obvious one. However, I will argue that this does not imply that the word has been rendered superfluous. Rather it involves us in a renewed seriousness about the signals that cluster, through history, around the language of divinity. A cluster of basic questions concerning human nature cluster around the discussion of digital technologies.
Digital technologies seem to have the effect of marginalizing the human body.
Sherry Turkle, among others, has studied how identities are easily assumed and discarded in the form of digital persona. In some approaches to technology, including those of Heidegger and Ellul, technology has the effect of reducing the human subject to a logical object. Given the classical Christian identification of the rational with the imago dei, a point of view adopted in a secularized form by the Enlightenment, the appearance of a rational or even quasi-rational, machine poses a threat to traditional anthropologies. I will attempt to place all three questions against the background of the history of the imago dei and pose the question of the future of Christian anthropology in a technological culture. Community Howard Reingold has promoted electronically constructed communities in his book, Virtual Community .