A Theology for a Mediated God

How Media Shapes Our Notions About Divinity

Dennis Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317401865
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A Theology for a Mediated God introduces a new way to examine the shaping effects of media on our notions of God and divinity. In contrast to more conventional social-scientific methodologies and conversations about the relationship between religion and media, Dennis Ford argues that the characteristics we ascribe to a medium can be extended and applied metaphorically to the characteristics we ascribe to God—just as earlier generations attempted to comprehend God through the metaphors of father, shepherd, or mother. As a result, his work both challenges and bridges the gap between students of religion and media, and theology.

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INTRODUCTION

God, Mediation, and Theology

To ask [a question] is to break the spell.¹

To live and experience anything is to translate its direct impact into many indirect forms of awareness.²

All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.³

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness . . . .⁴

When Christ Became the Message

This book applies the insights popularized by Marshall McLuhan’s iconic aphorism “the medium is the message” to the questions of theology. For theology, McLuhan’s cryptic aphorism can be expanded in at least two ways.

First, because God is not self-revealing or, as we said in the preface (p. ix), “hidden,” divinity can only be approached or apprehended through some sort of mediation or “medium.” In Christianity, an otherwise intangible, distant, and invisible God was brought down to earth and made physically present in and through the medium and person of Jesus. Birgit Meyer, along with David Morgan and others, has repeatedly argued that mediation is “intrinsic to religion” because “sensational forms . . . make the transcendental sense-able.” Indeed, she goes on to say at another point that religion is a “product of mediation, one in and through which some kind of spiritual or divine presence, however conceptualized, is effected, actualized, or materialized”⁵ (emphasis mine). Similarly, “The power of material culture,” Morgan affirms, “resides in its ability to make physically present what is otherwise distant or absent or insensate, to embody the inchoate feelings . . . the intangible or transcendent reality. . . .”⁶ Whether one speaks about “sensational forms”(Meyer) or “material culture” (Morgan), the point that the transcendent is necessarily approached, comprehended, invoked, and literally objectified through the mediation of religious objects (such as texts, images, and architectural spaces) and bodily practices (such as rituals, purification rites, and pilgrimages) is the same.

The second way that the “medium is the message” can be expanded is a corollary to the notion that mediation is inescapable. There’s a danger with mediation that the medium will become the message; that is to say, the mediating object will be identified wholly with that which is being mediated. In Christianity, Jesus—the medium—became the Christ, “true God from true God/ begotten not made/of one Being with the Father.” As we will say often in the course of this study, media are active metaphors in that they are not neutral or transparent conveyors of information but inescapably partial and selective, highlighting particular aspects of their object while ignoring others. Whenever we identify the medium or metaphor with that which we are trying to comprehend, understand, or “grasp,” we exchange metaphor for literalism, image for idol, ritual and prayer for magic. McLuhan is himself often criticized for falling victim to the seduction of abandoning metaphor for literalism whenever he spoke about the effects of media in causal or deterministic language rather than in the language of influence, tendency, or alignment.

The essential and intrinsic connection between religion and mediation suggests that theology is incomplete without a consideration of how media (as active metaphors) shape our understanding of God. Accordingly, this book examines how the way we understand divinity reflects the principal means and media we employ for articulating, storing, and communicating information. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate that “God” has a different meaning and is a response to a different set of questions depending on whether one lives in an oral or literate culture, in a culture dominated by words or images. Thus, for example, I will argue that the abstract, eternal word associated with literacy and the written word is congruent with an equally abstract, timeless, and unchanging God, whereas the effervescent and passing words of orality are congruent with a God that exists and comes to life only when spoken and preserved by the mnemonic devices of an oral tradition. Each medium offers its own set of satisfactions, including its own form or expression of transcendence.

At least since McLuhan coined his famous aphorism, scholars have argued that “intellectual technologies,” including writing, are not neutral media for the storage and communication of information. On the contrary, the invention and use of new media, especially the introduction of literacy, have transformed human consciousness or world views and provoked social movements such as the Protestant Revolution and, according to some, the rise of patriarchal societies and the alienation between Western culture and nature. Change in media, as an explanatory framework, has also been used to economically and cogently explain the shift from verse to prose, from magic to science, and from mythology to conceptual, rational ways of thinking. Neil Postman wrote a popular book twenty-five years ago demonstrating how the shift to electronic media, especially television, had changed the tenor of everything from education and religion to politics and entertainment.⁷

The use of media studies as an explanatory tool specifically applied to religious studies is widespread and, indeed, has become somewhat of a growth industry, especially when examining the effects of digital media. Thus, for example, scholars typically apply social-science methodologies to studying how television functions by affecting church attendance or how religious groups employ different social media to propagate their message or foster a sense of community. Other scholars have argued that the space and rituals associated with electronic games and media are analogous to the space and rituals formerly associated with religious activities and behaviors. In a largely secular culture, establishing analogies between religion and digital “spaces” and communities, or a methodological focus on the functions and effects of media on religion and religious institutions, permits the “bracketing” of theological questions regarding the characteristics people ascribe to God, not to mention the more committing ontological question whether God exists. As a consequence, despite much talk about media and religion, talk about God is oddly almost entirely absent.⁸ In contrast to religious studies that focus on questions that are amenable to social-scientific methodologies, my focus is more narrowly on theological questions concerning how our understanding of God can be articulated. (I will get to a brief definition of theology shortly.)

That God appears and is spoken about differently according to different contexts and questions is hardly a new idea. The academic discipline of comparative theology is based on the assumption that a person’s perception of God changes according to their age, psychological development, or culture. My study joins these previous studies by attributing theological diversity not to personal development, cultural, or sociological differences but to the way the perception of God (including the questions we ask) is mediated by a range of media, including word, image, and body. In short, I am attempting to do theology in a different way and, in so doing, contribute toward shifting the focus from media and religion to media and theology. A focus on the shaping effect of media suggests that we may have been asking the wrong, exclusively content questions, all along, while ignoring the formal contributions that media play in our theological reflections. “When I was young,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is reported to have said, “I thought I knew all the answers, but as I became older I discovered I was not asking the right questions.”⁹

Two Forms of Mediation

Our understanding of God is mediated by two, interrelated and mutually effecting considerations: the questions we ask, and the medium through which those questions come to light.

Questions

Questions are like metaphors: they mediate and direct our attention to particular aspects of our experience and define the boundaries of an acceptable answer. Imagine for a moment that you are meeting a person for the first time. What questions do you want to ask? Do you ask “What do you do?” or “Where do you live, or with whom?” or “Are you a runner or do you play tennis?” Each question focuses attention on one aspect of the person rather than another, and says something about what we consider to be important. What do you do? for example, says that we are interested in a person’s work (and perhaps economic status) and we inevitably make judgments about the person depending on the answer: “I’m a neurosurgeon” rather than “I’m a greeter at Wal-Mart.” Similarly, if we discover that a person plays tennis at a high level and we also play tennis, we may focus more on the person’s athletic ability than their profession. Asking whether and how well a person plays tennis highlights that aspect of the person’s life while ignoring other aspects, such as their marital status, political affiliations, or community involvement.

Importantly, an answer to either an explicit or implied question may be “true” but nevertheless inappropriate. If I ask “What color is a stop sign?” and you say “octagon,” I have an answer, even a true and understandable answer, but it is not an acceptable or sensible answer to my question and that to which the question is attending. All of which is to say that the questions we ask and the answers we find both appropriate and convincing—including our theological questions—may say as much about us, our expectations, and our context as they do about the subject we are addressing. Among all the possible questions we could ask, the questions we ask define the boundaries of our interests, what we will accept as an appropriate or true answer, and our perceptions of the person (or God) we are attempting to understand or know.

Richard Dawkins, the outspoken critic of religion asks the question “Does God exist?” in the same way—at least grammatically—that he would ask whether the Empire State building exists. “God’s existence or non-existence,” he says, “is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice.”¹⁰ Of all the possible questions he could ask about God or religion, Dawkins’s question focuses our attention on physical existence and, accordingly, the appropriate answer is either “yes” or “no.” In contrast, the Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman asks a different question and, in so doing redirects our attention. He asks not whether God exists as an “object” but whether there is a “trajectory of cosmic and historical forces which is . . . moving us toward a truly human and ecologically responsible” way of living.¹¹ If our question and expectations do not identify God with an object or being—perceived through our senses—but with a future-oriented process, then the appropriate answer to the question “Does God exist?” is more subtle than merely looking for evidence of a physical object like the Empire State building. For Kaufman, the question whether God exists is more like asking whether love or justice exist, rather than whether a building in Manhattan exists. Does God exist? We can understand neither the affirmative answer of Kaufman nor the negative answer of Dawkins until we understand more about questions and how they focus our attention in helping us understand what God means.

Media

Once again, imagine for a moment that you are meeting someone for the first time but you are not meeting them face-to-face at a party but indirectly, via emails or Skype for example. Beyond what questions we may want to ask, what we can ask and what answer we are able to receive in response are shaped and delimited by the media through which we communicate. The medium and mediation of words, for example—whether oral or written—can answer a question about “Where do you live?” but the medium of images, such as a photograph, is more useful in answering the question “What do you look like?” A picture on Facebook is worth more than a thousand words because it shows—rather than tells us about—a person’s face. On the other hand, a photograph is unable to tell me anything about your internal life of feelings or whether you believe in God, or something as simple as “How was your day?” In short, the media we use affects the kinds of questions we are capable of asking. We do not expect a photograph to answer a question about religious doctrine, nor do we expect that words alone will answer a question about what someone looks like. Consider for a moment the different ways we are “introduced” to Jesus according to whether he is mediated to us through philosophical concepts such as “He is three persons in one,” the iconography of the crucifixi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Theology for a Mediated God
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Why Theology?
• 1 Introduction: God, Mediation, and Theology
• 2 God and the Mediation of Orality
• 3 God and the Mediation of Literacy
• 4 God and the Mediation of the Figurative Image
• 5 God and the Mediation of the Body
• 6 God and the Mediation of Ones and Zeros
• 7 Conclusion: From Medium to Metaphor
• Index