My view is that while we do create tools, our tools do end up recreating us aswell. The internal combustion engine was a human invention, but its invention did have a profound effect on us too.

In his book Exclusion and Embrace theologian Miroslav Volf talks about creation in Genesis as a process of ‘separation and binding’: the water and the land are separated, humanity is bound in stewardship of the earth. Nic disagrees, but I think that this is a helpful metaphor for a good relationship to technology: we are bound to it – we cannot live without it – but we are also separate from it.

Now, using the ideas covered in the series of posts on ‘Bad Faith’, we might view this from another angle: our relationship to technology should have both facticity and transcendence, and it is when this duality collapses on either side that we see problems occuring. In a recent interview an Oxford Professor of Neurology expressed real concerns about the effect increased screen-time could have on our brains. Without practice at decoding the subtle and complex messages in face-to-face communication (nuance, tone, context, pheromones, gestures) our brains will perform worse in this area – and this could be a viscious cirle as embarrassment could lead to further withdrawal.

But, in my view, there is a parallel danger. By experiencing so many more relationships through media like Facebook or Twitter we risk collapsing the complexities of ‘the other’ into pure facticity: they become seen by us as no more than the sum of their status updates, and we also risk seeing ourselves in that way too. As Pete has pointed out, we are much more mysterious than that.

The danger works the other way too. Our status updates don’t mean nothing – they do communicate something of who we are, and to ignore them and claim separation from them is to collapse into pure transcendence – we are above all that.

Neither is true. We are separate from our social networks (virtual and ‘real’) but bound to them too. The art of living in technological ‘good faith’ is going to be negotiating the line between these two states, and avoiding the temptation to collapse either side.

I ended the previous post with the question of what we might mean by our decisions to denominate ourselves as ‘Christian’ or otherwise. Before I can answer that though, I think it is worth noting just how infatuated we are with denominating everything. Every new piece of music has to have its own sub-sub-sub genre, every dog and doll its own name. I went to a barbeque the other day, and it seemed that every condiment was branded to be directly out of someone’s kitchen: Paul Newman’s salad dressing, Mrs Miggins’ chutney, Jeremiah Colman’s mustard… We love to buy these things because we love to buy into the feeling that we are a part of something, part of their story.

So when we denominate ourselves as ‘Christian’ it is worth thinking about the motivations that may lie behind it. Are we simply ‘buying into’ faith because we want to feel included, to feel part of something (anything?) or are we actually committed to the story that the denomination implies?

As we’ve already seen, what Satre is getting at is that any act of naming carries with it a paradox of facticity and transcendence. So if we are truly to call ourselves Christian we need to be prepared to embrace this paradox. Indeed, one might simply say that a Christian is simply someone attempting to live ‘in good faith.’

For those on the more traditional wing of the church, this will probably mean avoiding the collapse of the paradox into facticity, and a commitment to exploring the transcendent side of both ourselves and our faith. It will mean meditating that ‘it is only at the level of person, […] this abyss beyond all properties, that man is “in the image of God.”‘ Will asked me to explore what I meant by the ‘transcendent abyss-mal side’; what I mean by this is a willingness to accept that we are each, as individuals, unable to fully describe ourselves, or be described. Our person-alities are in this sense an abyss – bottomless, and thus quite dark. If this is the sense in which are in God’s image, then we have to accept too that our faith can never be adequately described in a creed or set of rational statements.

For those on the more, ‘emerging’ wing of the church, living ‘in good faith’ will instead mean avoiding the collapse of the paradox into transcendence, and a commitment to exploring the facticity of ourselves and our faith. It will mean meditating on the fact that calling oneself a Christian does actually imply something about our view of the world. We should not shy away from this, but be happy to nail our colours to the mast.

Most importantly though, it will mean a constant negotiation of this paradoxical state. Satre was well aware that language and communication requires that we denominate. But that does not mean things are simple. What interests me about the Judeo-Christian history is that we are engaging a God who is well aware of this paradox too, a God who has a name, but will not and cannot be named.

It is this God, named and nameless, transcendent and factual that we attempt to emulate, and in doing so, must work towards living in good faith, in the tension of this paradox, too.

Satre also used the example of a man looking back over his life and sexual experiences. Would it be right for him to call himself ‘homosexual’ simply because of the sum of his past actions and current feelings? In other words, is this individual a homosexual, in the same way that a table might be metal?

A table is a table because it has the essential properties of a table. We know what a table is. But Satre’s argument is that we are not human because we do human-like things. Our consciousness, as Satre put it, is ‘non self-identifying.’ We are not simply the things that we do, or feel: we have ‘both facticity and transcendence.’ We are what we are, but precisely part of our being is that we are not simply what we are – we can transcend this.

Too often we fail to live properly within this paradox, and when we do, we are in ‘bad faith.’ What interests me, and what I’ll look at in the next post, is how Jesus’ critique of the religion of his day was precisely a dual critique of the collapse of this paradox into pure facticity or pure transcendence – a critique that I think is at the heart of the struggle for the rebirth of our faith again today.

Since listening to a short podcast on the subject I’ve been very interested in Satre’s idea of ‘Bad Faith’, and I want to explore some thoughts springing from it in a short series of posts.

As an existentialist, one of the central tenets of Satre’s thought was complete freedom. Everyone is free – but some people choose to live in ‘bad faith’, trying to deny this true freedom, and acting as virtual automatons as a result. One of the examples that Satre used was of a waiter he observed in a Parisian café. He was acting too much like a waiter: putting on a very obvious waiterly manner. Satre sees him as play-acting the role of a waiter, and thus presents us with this paradox: his acting as a waiter means he is presenting himself as an object, a robot who is programmed to be the good waiter – and thus he is denying his true freedom. But on the other hand, his acting shows that he is aware at some level that he is more than just a waiter. He is thus deceiving himself, and acting in ‘bad faith.’

The root of the problem, Satre perceives (or, more accurately, I perceive Satre to perceive) is that the acting that the waiter does is a play in the space between the Self and the Other. The waiter is presenting an act to us of the object we expect a waiter to be… and we are acting out similar plays of being waited upon. Thus:

“The human reality is one characterized by a dialectic of facticity and transcendence, of being what it is not and not being what it is, of a relation to the Other and a relation to the Self. The resulting synthesis is a murky amalgamation of contradictory phenomena. The human person thus perpetually becomes a battleground between opposing forces. The resulting instability becomes itself the very condition for the inevitability of bad faith.”

The problem that this presents is that the bad faith that the waiter is displaying is itself a free decision to take. Extrapolating this to belief, Satre notes that: “to believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.“

You may not be a waiter. But what about the parts we play in our decision to denominate ourselves as ‘Christian’ or ‘Jew’ or ‘American’? Are we acting in bad faith by naming what we believe? I’ll explore that in the next post.