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A recent read is the book by Shane Hipps called Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith . Although I am only part way through, it is proving to be a fascinating read, and one theory in particular stands out.
Hipps is influenced by the work of a professor of media and communication called Marshall McLuhan. This is the guy who came up with the expression “Global Village”. McLuhan firmly believed that the medium was the message. What that means is that we are as influenced by the way that we are told something as by what we are told.
Hipps comes up with a very interesting example of this based on the medium of the printed word. In the fifteenth century Johannes Gutenberg modified a wine press and made something which could print words. Up to this point books had to be written out by hand. This made them very expensive and very rare. Most people could not read, and had never seen a book.
This is why there are stained glass windows in churches. The pictures tell the story of who Jesus is, the miracles he performed, his life and death. In this way everyone could know about Jesus despite the fact that they did not have access to a Bible and could not read.
Hipps notes that once the printed word was invented it affected everything. He even points out that churches began to look like words printed on a page. Until then churches were big open spaces where people stood. There were no chairs and no pews. But then pews were introduced and people looked at the back of someone’s head in nice rows, in the same way that words were printed on the page in two neat coloumns (p.47).
But perhaps the biggest way that the medium of the printed word changed things was that it made the message more efficient. Stained glass windows told stories of the Bible: creation, the flood, Jesus’ miracles. These stories were open ended, expansive, non-linear. They drew you in, required imagination and were open to interpretation.
The printing press meant that the letters of Paul could now be communicated. Paul’s letters are complex and could not be communicated in stained glass - even the Apostle Peter had found them hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16). This basically resulted in two things. Firstly a simplification of the Gospel message. Hipps expresses this simplification as,
Apologize for your sins + Believe Jesus = Go to Heaven (p.48)
Secondly, it resulted in the growth of reasoning skills and academic study that Paul’s letters inspired. It was this that supported and allowed the Reformation.
Hipps talks about this medium of reasoning and intellectualism as ‘medium reversed’. The media of reasoning and intellectualism became ‘overextended’.
This led to the belief that the gospel could be established and received only through reason and fact. (p.49)
I guess the reason that I find this interesting is because a number of public figures are wading in on the Christianity verses New Atheism debate by denouncing their Christian faith. But this denouncement is expressed in terms of a frustration with what often seems like a Church which is too influenced by the media of reasoning and intellectualism. Me being me, most of my examples come from the world of music. The first is the ex-lead singer of the Christian rock group Tree63, John Ellis.
An article came out which had some impact on the church in South Africa. Perhaps it was overly influenced by the medium of journalism, and so John Ellis wrote about the article on his own blog. You get a strong sense that Ellis is disaffected with the culture and medium that is attached to the Gospel rather than the Gospel itself.
Another example is David Bazan.
From the literary world Anne Rice says,
...following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.
So, is the church doing something wrong? I guess that is the ‘conversation’ which is sometimes called Emerging Christianity. I personally can empathize with some of the views expressed by these people, but can also overlook some aspects of the church because I ultimately believe that no matter how broken or wrong the church is, it is a medium in itself, hopefully a medium of God’s grace.
