Cybertheology from a Theoretical Approach: Conceptual Considerations and Proposals

Apps, Artificial Intelligence (AI), internet, Internet of Things (IoT), metaverses, social networks, and virtual assistants are changing our faith, ecclesial communities, pastoral actions, religious experiences, and theology, especially accelerated by the corona-virus pandemic. Although the emergence of a new discipline that studies the mediation of faith in digital technologies and its pastoral impacts is widely accepted, a systematized reflection on it is still lacking. However, in recent years, cybertheology approach is emerging in the Catholic academic field to explain all these phenomena; and for this reason, researchers are developing its object of study as well as concepts or methodologies of this new subject. In this article, cybernetics science is proposed as a significant epistemological basis for cybertheology because it facilitates dialogue with other disciplines for building conceptual knowledge. In particular, it is relevant in two main issues: first, cybernetics has biblical, ecclesial, communicational, epistemological, philosophi-cal, and scientifical bases. Second, cybernetics is a well-funded inter-transdisciplinary science. With both of these topics, it is possible to study the complex relationships between God, believers, communication, and technologies. In this paper, the concept of the noosphere proposed by Teilhard de Chardin is appropriated for modeling all these complexities in a critical, ethical, and prophetic standpoint.