Paul Tillich & cyberpunk theology

I very often very consciously wish that Paul Tillich was still alive.

Tillich intellectually positioned himself on the boundaries of category, culture, and even epistemology in a way that cultural critics rarely do, let alone theologians.

He died in 1965.

Before the Internet.

If he were alive today, I think he'd be the thinker that could hammer out a working version of human spirituality in the Internet age.

From Tillich's The Courage to Be:

The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut off from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to one object of devotion to another and again on to another, because the meaning of each of them vanishes and the creative eros is transformed into indifference or aversion.

Tillich's ability to marry existentialism and transcendence would resonate with issues of alienation brought on by technology, especially the themes distilled in cyberpunk literature:

Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.

Unlike this guy, I'm not sure about chalking up human spirituality to primitive thinking and completely dropping it.

I think it makes more sense for spirituality to modernize, for conceptions of God to modernize.

But for spirituality to modernize, we are gonna need thinkers that can stitch together a new working narrative of the spiritual (human) transcendence in a technical world.

I think we're gonna need cyberpunk theologians/cultural theorists in the vein of Paul Tillich to speak to human alienation in the age of the technium and resample it into new, generative culture.