After several generations came and went and nothing of the sort happened, other interpretations began to emerge. Perhaps Jesus was talking about the afterlife and the more ethereal promises of heaven? Perhaps the kingdom was simply a steady accumulation of justice and equality that humans were tasked with achieving?
When I was growing up in the church, the popular evangelical interpretation was “open eschatology,” according to which the kingdom is both “now” and “not yet.” All the glories of heaven are yet to come, but we can already glimpse them here on earth. It’s a somewhat inelegant interpretation that, in retrospect, looks like an attempt to get (quite literally) the best of both worlds: Believers can enjoy heaven in the present and also later in heaven. It’s this theological framework that comes to mind when I hear Zuckerberg talk about the physical world, AR, VR, and the porous boundaries between them. When he talks about existing “mixed reality” technologies as an ontological stop on the way to a fully immersive virtual heaven, he sounds (to my ears at least) an awful lot like theologian George Eldon Ladd, who once wrote that heaven is “not only an eschatological gift, belonging to the Future Century; it is also a gift to be received in the old aeon.”
All technological endeavors are, when you get down to it, eschatological narratives. We, the inhabitants of the modern world, implicitly believe that we are enmeshed in a story of progress that is building toward a dazzling transformation (the Singularity, the Omega Point, the descent of the True and Only Metauniverse) that promises to radically alter reality as we know it. It is a story that is as robust and malleable as any religious prophecy. Any technological failure can be absorbed back into the narrative, becoming yet another obstacle that technology will one day overcome.
One of the most appealing aspects of the metaverse for me is the promise of being delivered from the screen-mediated digital-physical dualism and once again experiencing a more seamless connection with “reality” (whatever that is).
But perhaps we are wrong to look so intently to the future for our salvation. Although I myself am no longer a believer, when I review Christ’s promises of the kingdom, I cannot help but think that he was greatly misunderstood. When the Pharisees asked him directly when the kingdom would come, he replied, “The kingdom of God is within you.” It is a riddle that suggests that this paradise does not belong to the future at all, but is rather an individual spiritual realm that everyone can access here and now. In his ConfessionsSt. Augustine, sounding like a Buddhist or Taoist sage, marveled at the fact that the wholeness he had long sought in the outer world was “within me all the time.”
When you describe, Virtual, your longing to live in a digital simulation that looks like reality but is somehow better, I can’t help but think that we have forgotten the original metauniverse we already have within us – the human imagination. Reality as we experience it is inherently augmented – by our hopes and fears, our idle daydreams and our screaming nightmares. This inner world, invisible and omnipresent, has given rise to all religious longings and produced every technological and artistic marvel that has ever appeared among us. Indeed, it is the source and seed of the metauniverse itself, which originated, like all inventions, as the vaporized trickle of an idea. Even now, amidst the constant, time-limited entropy of the physical world, you can access this virtual realm whenever you want, from anywhere in the world—no $300 headset required. It will be just as exciting as you want it to be.
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