Gaming and the Divine

A New Systematic Theology of Video Games

Frank G. Bosman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429018688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie

This book formulates a new theological approach to the study of religion in gaming. Video games have become one of the most important cultural artifacts of modern society, both as mediators of cultural, social, and religious values and in terms of commercial success. This has led to a significant increase in the critical analysis of this relatively new medium, but theology as an academic discipline is noticeably behind the other humanities on this subject.

The book first covers the fundamentals of cultural theology and video games. It then moves on to set out a Christian systematic theology of gaming, focusing on creational theology, Christology, anthropology, evil, moral theology, and thanatology. Each chapter introduces case studies from video games connected to the specific theme. In contrast to many studies which focus on online multiplayer games, the examples considered are largely single player games with distinct narratives and 'end of game' moments. The book concludes by synthesizing these themes into a new theology of video games.

This study addresses a significant aspect of contemporary society that has yet to be discussed in any depth by theologians. It is, therefore, a fantastic resource for any scholar engaging with the religious aspects of digital and popular culture.

1 Fundamentals I

A theology of culture

In the second part of the 20th century, the concept of ‘cultural theology’ emerged strongly among other so-called contextualized theologies (Nicholis 1979): theologies that originate from and for certain ethnic, social or other, often marginalized, groups who argue that the regular theological debates are dominated by white males from Western universities and ecclesiastical organizations. Think for example of queer theology (Cornwall 2011), black theology (Cone 1997) and gay theology (Comstock 2009).

And while the concept of inculturation (Dhavamony 1997; Shorter 1999; Irarrázaval 2000; Orji 2005), the adaption of the Gospel to the cultural Umwelt of a particular group of faithful, has been practiced since the era of the Great Discoveries, the rise of liberation theology in Africa and Southern America, in which God’s preferential option for the poor and marginalized is argued (Rowland 2007; Noble 2013), has given a whole new impulse to theological thinking about the relationship between contextualized cultural phenomena and the Gospel of Jesus Christ (Hegeman 2007; Edgar 2017).

Since Paul Tillich’s famous Theology of culture (1959), to which we will return shortly, a considerable amount of cultural theologies has seen the light of day: either general in scope (Tanner 1997; Cobb 2005; Lynch 2005; Gorringe 2007; Long 2008; Usselmann 2018) or dedicated to a specific ethnical-cultural domain (Dyrness 1992; Nogsiej 2001) or to multicultural phenomena like the entertainment industry (Taylor 2008) or the hip hip-hop scene (Hodge 2010). Also numerous edited volumes have been published, for example, on the relation between science, theology and culture (Meisinger et al. 2006); theology with regard to everyday life (Vanhoozer et al. 2007) or theological criticisms on modern-day culture (Brown et al. 2001).

All cultural theologies have some similarities. They try to break through the neo-scholastic dogmatism, dominant in Roman Catholic theology since the Council of Trent (1545–1563) while adopting a more inclusive attitude toward multiculturalism, scientific progress and modern media, convinced that God’s revelation does not halt at the gates of ecclesiastical institutes or traditional theological tractates. These modern cultural theologies can be seen, as already argued in the introduction of this volume, as some sort of reemergence of more classic ‘natural theology’ but without the theological arrogance of proving God’s existence purely rationally (McGrath 2008).

However relatively modern the rise of these cultural theologies is, I believe that this kind of thinking has many older advocates within the theological history of Christianity, as I show in the following. But first of all, we must give a reckoning of the perilous and somewhat problematic position of (institutionalized) religion in the Western world. It is from this secularized world that the games originate that are at the heart of this volume: the same world to which the cultural theologies are a response to.

a. The problem of religion in Western Europe

Institutionalized religion is not in the best of shapes, at least in Western Europe (Pew Research 2018), a situation alternatively described as ‘secularization’ (Casanova 2009; Joas 2009), ‘de-institutionalization’ (Streib 2007) or religious ‘liquidation’ (de Groot 2018) and/or ascribed to broader sociological phenomena like the rise of individualism (Flanagan 2001) or the dominance of the model of multiculturalism (Morris 2014). While institutionalized religion is decreasing rapidly through the Western world, the classic secularization thesis as such is problematic on at least two levels: in the first place, secularization is primarily a phenomenon of the Western, post-Christian world, and second, even in the secularized Western world religion is far from a relic of a past long gone.

Even though explicit (institutionalized) religion is often debated about in the context of its more negative and problematic features like religiously inspired terrorism, child abuse or homophobia, the implicit (de-institutionalized) form of religion is still very present in our so-called post-religious society, either in the shape of a hyper-individual and eclectic ‘bricolage’ spirituality (Altglas 2014) or in the shape of the utilizations of and reference to the Christian tradition in cultural expressions, such as films (Johnston et al. 2007; Marsh 2014) pop songs and video clips (Beaudoin et al. 2013), novels (Middleton 2008) and video games (which is the prime aspect of this volume in the first place).

This complex position of religion, may it be in its institutionalized or its individualized form, can be understood from four different contexts in which the religious phenomenon (institutions, groups and individuals) is discussed and addressed in our times: the political-social, the scholarly philosophical, the religious-philosophical and the religious-anthropological contexts.

1. The political-social context

Religion as an exclusively private matter is one of the more ‘pervasive’ religion clichés in the Western political and cultural imagination, although every scholar of religion will explain that any religious belief ‘cannot be held without some mediation by the social’ (Walsh 2017). Bart Labuschagne (2013:15–16) has described this tendency to lock religion up into the private sphere in terms of a battle between ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’ and ‘liberal jihadists’, terms which are used by the one party to disqualify the other:

Religion has to be kept out of the political process as much as possible, relegating it to the confinement of the private sphere only, where each is allowed to gain salvation in his or her own way. [… The other party] blame[s] their adversaries to be naïve multiculturalists, too soft in their inclusion (and even cuddling) of ‘the other’, in letting ‘these others’ participate in political life uncritically, without having let them undergone the blessings of Enlightenment.

In many Western countries, a considerable group of religious citizens are positioned against a strongly secularized social elite, whose opinions on religion degrade the religious feelings of these citizens. Within this heated standoff between ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’ and ‘liberal jihadists’ a balanced discussion about the private or public character of religion can hardly be held.

2. The scholarly philosophical context

The second context that could explain the perilous position of religion in the Western countries, is the scholarly philosophical, especially the dominance of metaphysical reductionism within the dominant empirical paradigm. As theologians such as Chan (2003) have shown, the notion of reductionism has shifted from a purely methodological instrument (we can only scientifically study what we can verify empirically) through an epistemological standpoint (we can only know what we can verify empirically) to a full-fledged metaphysical statement in itself (only that is what we can verify empirically).

But this metaphysical position is unable to prove its own philosophical axioms. And like every paradigm, it runs the risk of the fallacy of ‘nothing-but-ism’ (Sitelman and Sitelman 2000). As Arjan Plaisier (2014:14) summarizes,

[worldviews have] a tendency to employ a form of reasoning which makes their work form a ‘nothing else but-ism’. The world is nothing, they say, but the end result of a blind big bang. Or, man is nothing but a trained animal. Again, man is concerned solely to enhance his own interest, life being nothing else than having the stronger overcome the weaker. Man is nothing but a combination of love and passion. Man is nothing but the product of social conditioning. Man is nothing more than his brain. And so on.

When projected onto the religious domain, the dominance of this empirical paradigm and its inherent metaphysical reductionism can be found in two forms (Flood 2007). On one hand, religion is considered to be a delusion ‘that has served the interest of the rich and the powerful’ (cultural reductionism), while on the other hand, the religious phenomenon is reduced to cognition and language (naturalist or eliminative reductionism). These kinds of reductionisms are also very popular with the general, non-scholarly public, for example, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006) or We Are Our Brains by Dick Swaab (2015). Within this context, religion is reduced to other human qualities, thus hindering the public and academic discussion about religion as a separate field of inquiry.

3. Religious-philosophical context

Many Western countries are characterized as being multicultural and multireligious but as Beckford (2014:21–24) has observed, the notion of religious plurality is not only an empirical description of reality but also has normative qualities. The ‘near-infinite yet random number of spiritual and religious positions’ (Hunter 2009) are seen as a positive development: religious pluralism is a good thing that should be stimulated by society. Beckford (2014:22) sees a paradox in this:

The positive evaluation of religious diversity has paradoxically acquired the force of a unitary standard of rectitude in some places. This raises the question of whether liberal democracies have reached a point where expressions of doubt of the desirability of religious diversity are automatically categorized as ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’.

The idea of (religious) pluralism, so favored in Western societies, is indeed not without its own problems. This problem becomes apparent in the famous discussion between the theologian Gavin D’Costa with his Doktorvater John Hick, who has been qualified as one of the founding fathers of religious pluralism. Hick’s thesis can be summarized as ‘the denial of the superiority or finality of any given religion, especially Christianity’ (Knitter 1987:viii).

The center of the religious sphere, according to Hick (1996:17) and his followers is the Real, the final religious object. The various religions are expressions of the impingement of this unknowable Real. All religions, therefore, share the same soteriological structure: the transformation of the devotee from self-centeredness to centeredness on the Real. Other religions are not rivals but companions on the journey to the Ultimate. Hick’s ideas of religious pluralism have become dominant in the Western political and academic spheres.

Theologians like John Millbank, Alasdair MacIntyre and, especially, Gavin D’Costa have criticized Hick’s pluralism as a typical modern fear of religious conflicts, reducing the palette of (world) religions and denominations to one of their (supposed) denominators. The major problem, according to D’Costa (2000), with the notion of religious pluralism is its implicit but inherent exclusivism, which was paradoxically enough the pluralists’ biggest reproach to the adherents of traditional religious views. Those who do not share the idea that all religions are essentially equal are disqualified from the discussion. D’Costa (2000:20):

Pluralists simply present themselves as honest brokers to disputing parties, while concealing the fact that they represent yet another party which invites the disputants actually to leave their parties and join the pluralist one: then, of course, interreligious harmony will be attained.

As Beckford (2014:22) has observed, religious pluralism as envisaged by Hick is in practice confined to ‘acceptable groups’, that is, to those who accept its epistemological axiom. The same applies to modern-day political discussions about the position of religion in the public domain or the more popular-philosophical debates about the sensibility of religion: all religions and their adherents are equal, except for those who (respectfully and non-violently) disagree with that idea.

4. Religious-anthropological context

In the modern debate, either academically or sociopolitically, one of the persevering discussions is whether religion should be seen as a confessio (confession) or a praxis (practice) or, in more theological terms, as orthodoxy (right belief) or orthopraxis (right practice). The former describes religion in terms of what is believed, the doctrinaire content of a faith, while the latter concentrates on how religion is performed, the set of ethical, moral and social behaviors of adherents of a religion. As Bell (2009:191) has observed,

[a]s a result of the dominance of Christianity in much of the West, which has tended to stress matters of doctrinal and theological orthodoxy, people may take it for granted that religion is primarily a matter of what one believes. Yet in many religious traditions, concerns for what a person believes are often subsumed within more embracing concerns to live according to a code of behavior, a code that usually includes multiple ritual responsibilities.

The opposite is also possible and is just as problematic. As Fries (1996:111) has commented,

[b]ut today it is often seen alternatively, or even solved, in the sense that orthodoxy is unimportant and it is orthopraxy that really counts. This would turn orthodoxy into a marginal problem or into an outmoded stage in the history of faith.

Both positions in their own capacity lead to two forms of religious reductionism. Religion seen as confessio runs the risk of being seen as a set of philosophical and/or theological propositions, which could be reduced to ‘a mere opinion’ like all others. Religion seen as praxis also runs the risk of reduction, now to a potentially infinite set of hyper-particular individuals and groups whose behavior can only be viewed and interpreted as ‘exotic’, outlandish and strictly alogical or even illogical.

This problematization of religion within these four contexts makes the position of its adherents, its institutions and those who want to study it utterly complex. It is this complexity to which the manifold cultural theologies are often an answer to or, at least, have to position themselves over and against. The same applies to the cultural theology proposed in this volume. Before constructing my own version of cultural...