By Pastor Stephen Hess –
A couple of months ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his multi-billion-dollar company was changing its name to “Meta” and ushering in a new way of connecting to others through the internet. “The next platform will be even more immersive—an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build,” said Zuckerberg. The concept of the metaverse is to have a network of virtual worlds through which people can travel and interact, substituting their physical reality for virtual reality.
Virtual reality is not a new concept. By now most of us have seen (or perhaps even tried) those VR headsets that people use for video games or entertainment experiences. But Zuckerberg’s vision seems to be much larger than entertainment; he wants to change the way human beings experience the world around them, and he is not alone. Increasing numbers of companies and influencers are encouraging us to substitute the physical for the virtual, claiming that this is the new frontier of human experience. The question is: What should Christians think about this?
One of the key Biblical truths that needs to be recovered in our digital age is that human beings are embodied beings. God created us with bodies and our bodies are good. This truth is affirmed throughout the Scriptures. When God created the first human being, he chose to create Adam not as a disembodied spirit but as an embodied being: “The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). Likewise, when Eve was created, she was formed from Adam’s own flesh and was given her own physical body (Gen. 2:21). Thus we see that from the beginning, having a body was central to what it means to be human.
In the New Testament, the goodness of the body is also affirmed. There were some ancient groups like the Gnostics who taught that the material world was evil, and the spiritual world was good. Consequently, they believed that it didn’t matter how we used our material bodies. However, the early Christians rejected this way of thinking. The Apostle Paul wrote, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:19-20). According to Scripture, our bodies are sacred and how we use them is extremely important.
The Bible teaches not only that we have bodies in this life, but that God’s people will also have bodies in eternity. Paul says that one day Christ will “transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:21). This is why when we recite the Apostles’ Creed we say the words, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Even after death, our bodies will remain a central part of what it means to be human.
This Biblical framework exposes one of the central problems with Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse and our wider culture’s shift toward virtual reality: they encourage us to substitute disembodied experiences for embodied ones. Zuckerberg and many others think that this will enhance what it means to be human. Yet if God created us to live an embodied existence where physical presence is central to human connection, then anything that moves us away from this God-given design is actually dehumanizing.
Sometimes Christians accept new technologies uncritically without pausing to consider whether such technologies pose spiritual dangers. I even saw one mega-church that recently started offering services “in the metaverse” and encouraging people to worship in virtual reality. Some might defend this by saying, “Why does the medium matter so long as the message is good?” But if the medium is leading us to be less human rather than more human, then it compromises the message. The metaverse is ultimately dehumanizing because it encourages people to experience life in a way that we were never meant to live. God created us to exist in the body, and to encourage anything else leads people away from life as God intended it to be lived.
Many people in our world are lost and are searching for a more fulfilling and more abundant life. Unfortunately, they will not find it in the metaverse. That life can only be found through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ who said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10). As we follow Jesus and point others to him, we are called to set an example of how God intended life to be lived. This means being really present in real community as we worship a real Savior. This may not be as flashy as the metaverse, but this is what our souls truly need.