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The rise of the Internet’s World Wide Web in the mid-1990s launched an unlikely hero into the media spotlight: Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of movable printing type and technological forefather of the vernacular Bible. Reporters, Internet columnists and even some scholars began parading Gutenberg before the public as a kind of poster child for the digital revolution. The Net, we were told, would do for modern society what Gutenberg’s invention had done for the Renaissance: spread the fruits of mass education by democratizing communication. Everyone would become a publisher. By late 1997, public discourse about the Net was so deeply anchored in Gutenbergian mythology that skeptics of the digital revolution were sometimes dismissed without a reasonable hearing.

In hopes of digging deeper, I revisited the long-departed world of Gutenberg and of the first major mass communicator to use Gutenberg’s technology -- Martin Luther. I wondered what more significantly shapes the use of new technology, the nature of that technology itself or the social and economic context in which it developed? More specifically, how might a strongly religious context, the rise of the Reformation, have influenced how the printing press was distributed and institutionalized? Does it make any sense to compare the life and times of Gutenberg or Luther with those of Bill Gates and Pope John Paul II?

In our understanding of the digital revolution, I think we stand about where Gutenberg and Luther did, with plenty of ideas and little firm grasp. If confusion is democracy, we are rolling in the green. The techno-gurus offer their poster children to all takers -- often at quite a price on the lecture circuit. Business is rolling in the cash as well as losing its shirt with trendy ideas and faddish management books that have ignored far more business wisdom than they have created. Religious groups, too, are busily cultivating the digital landscape, often funded by donors who hope that pornographers or other evil folks will not commandeer the future. And then there are scholars and professors, myself included, who claim to see some truth in the so-called digital revolution. Bless all of their souls, for we shall need as much help as we can get.

Like all of us, Gutenberg (1394-1468) inherited a social and technological world created by previous generations. Monks gave their lives to the painstaking process of copying one page of a manuscript after another, until finally another "book" was completed for religious leaders. Reading itself was largely the domain of priests and, to some extent, their wealthy, educated patrons.

When Gutenberg was a young man, someone in Western Europe invented block printing (already used for centuries in China), in which "printers" carved outlines of words or pictures on a block of wood and then inked them for the "press." The movable-type printing press, for which Gutenberg is so well known, was invented in about 1450, 70 years before the outbreak of the Reformation. In this process, masterminded at least partly by Gutenberg, printers placed reusable, individual letters or characters of type in a form to create a printable page. Hand copying of manuscripts was time-consuming and highly individualized; no two manuscripts were exactly the same. Printing, on the other hand, created a means to make artificial copies that merely imitated the "authentic" reproduction process of the scribes. Printing was considered artless and crude -- a kind of cheap imitation or virtual copy of the real thing.

Printers and scribes competed for customers into the second half of the 15th century, when printing finally won the day. Scribes catered to the luxury market by crafting elegant, high-quality manuscripts -- much like the difference today between handcrafted and factory-made furniture. But as the prices of printed volumes declined, scribes found themselves without work -- like COBOL programmers in the 1980s. At first, scribes sought legal protection for their former monopoly, but they eventually gave in to the inevitable by inserting printed sections into their handwritten works. Some scribes even became consultants, advising printers on how to design their pages to look like calligraphic art.

Early printing was financially risky. The ability to print books did not guarantee a means of marketing them successfully. Printers were driven not by the religious and artistic impulses of the scribes, but by the economic realities of the marketplace. The early years of promise also created the stress of uncertainty -- perhaps a feature in the rise of all new media. No one demonstrates this more than Gutenberg.

The public mythology about Gutenberg locates him in a saintly world of disinterested inventors. The truth is that he was an entrepreneur who took one financial risk after another, using other people’s money, and who maintained a secrecy that was designed to keep any potential competitors from gleaning his ideas. Gutenberg worked so surreptitiously that the best documents we have about his business affairs and technological inventions are from the courts, where he battled unhappy investors who had tired of his many promises and few results.

Throughout his career, Gutenberg repeatedly solicited additional capital, but refused to offer his "product" for sale until he had perfected the process. He became a kind of entrepreneurial schemer who continuously had to develop new, fundable ideas in order to keep the money on the table for his major preoccupation -- the movable-type press. Gutenberg created the mold for casting precisely similar letters and numbers. He also developed an ink that would adhere uniformly to the type. He took various partners and developed other business enterprises along the way in order to fund his desire to hit it big in printing.

Gutenberg’s tight secrecy, accompanied by his burn rate, led to his decline. He would even dismantle his experimental equipment during his various lawsuits so no one could figure out what he was up to. One of these lawsuits finally wiped him out financially. His financiers won all of Gutenberg’s materials and equipment, and hired away Gutenberg’s foreman, who knew how to use the technology -- an early case of corporate raiding, perhaps. It was they, not Gutenberg, who published the so-called Gutenberg Bible sometime before 1456 and used Gutenberg’s technology to print the elegant Latin Psalter (1457) and the Catholicon (1460), a reprint of a popular encyclopedia compiled in the 13th century. Meanwhile, Gutenberg, destitute and almost blind, eventually received from the archbishop of Mainz an annual allowance of corn and wine, along with a suit of clothing. There is a lesson here for the depressed areas of Silicon Valley.

Since Gutenberg clearly had the elements of movable-type printing before investors shut him down, why did he fail to launch the world’s first book-printing business? The answer appears to be that Gutenberg did not see himself in the printing business per se, but in the religious-manuscript business. Gutenberg’s aesthetic paradigm defined the book as an extension of the manuscript, not as a distinct creation. Manuscripts, however, were not just the creation of scribes, but also the craft of highly gifted illuminators. Gutenberg’s movable-type technology itself would simply not enable him to compete on the illuminators’ aesthetic terms.

Unable to foresee the nonreligious market for simple printing, he yoked his business to a religious interpretation of the godly craft of illumination -- to the idea of "text" as a means of authentically pleasing God. He repeatedly delayed the launch of his technology until he could solve the problem of creating grand illuminations within his printed books. Those delays cost him his business.

As one historian put it, Gutenberg "succeeded in automating the scribe, but not the illuminator." Or as I would put it, Gutenberg framed his aesthetic paradigm for the printing business within the religious-manuscript market of the day. This paradigm did not suit the iconoclastic times that were around the corner. The Protestant emphasis on "the Word" would create new secular and sacred markets. Protestants liked simple, printed books, and might have loved amazon.com. As Elizabeth Eisenstein, who wrote one of the classic works on the rise of mass printing in Europe, put it, Protestantism was "the first movement of any kind, religious or secular, to use the new presses for overt propaganda and agitation against an established institution." The Protestant church reformers "unwittingly pioneered as revolutionaries and rabble rousers." What some people might call a "democratic" development, others might call a "propagandistic" movement or paper spam.

Religious and financial interests merged in the Protestant Reformation, where printing was both a lively business and a potentially powerful form of religious communication. Martin Luther became the first mass-mediated publicist or propagandist. As historian Mark Edwards claims, Luther "dominated publicity to a degree that no other person to my knowledge has ever dominated a major propaganda campaign and mass movement since. Not Lenin, not Mao Tse-tung, not Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Patrick Henry." For several years during the Reformation, evangelicals like Luther quickly and effectively reached large audiences with "thousands of pamphlets discrediting the old faith and advocating the new." These pamphlets were cheap, easy to distribute, quick to read and easy to conceal. They were hawked on the street and in taverns, and advertised with jingles. Luther’s New Testament vernacular Bible, with commentary, set the stage for later commentated Bibles that guided the reader’s interpretation.

Luther had a knack for the new communications medium; other evangelicals were not nearly so effective. Luther himself democratized the medium by pushing out his products and making them cheap to print and distribute in the interest of printers and publishers. For one thing, reprintings of Luther’s pamphlets made money for printers, who did not have to worry about copyright law. Luther himself was interested not in cash infusions, but in distribution -- give away the product free and you might create a market! For another, Luther’s pamphlets were inexpensive compared with vernacular Bibles, so why not get the gist without all of the expense and hard work? Even some Roman Catholic publicists printed and distributed Luther’s anti-Catholic pamphlets. Luther roundly criticized sloppy, profit-driven printers who marketed the Bible, but his quest for a vernacular version of the scriptures also inherently tied believers’ spiritual thirst to the capitalistic energies of an expanding mass-communications business.

This merger of financial and religious interests made printing the first truly mass medium in Western history. Even so, the printing press was not a "mass" medium in the sense of reaching everyone; most people were spectators of the religious drama that was unfolding in the new medium -- as in the early years of the Internet, when most people did not have access. But the press could nevertheless reach more people more quickly and more cheaply than any previous medium. Like e-mail today, the press could distribute messages to many people -- if they had access to the technology and knew how to use it (that is, if they were literate).

During the first half of the 16th century, Catholics and various Protestants, especially Luther, competed in the new court of printed public opinion. Between 1518 and 1546 alone, printers produced at least 6 million vernacular religious tracts -- one for every two members of the German-speaking lands. Apparently Protestants did a better job of communicating their messages; their treatises were often less expensive, more compelling rhetorically, and hence more widely printed, distributed and read. But the Protestant messages might also have been more open to various interpretations, enabling readers to hear in them what they wanted to hear, prefiguring what Jacques Ellul in this century called the "propaganda" of the media. As Edwards concludes, "In general, the messages sent were not always the messages received, and the historian who seeks to reconstruct the early Reformation message and its appeal must pay at least as much attention to the context of its readers (and hearers) as to the text that they read (or had presented to them)."

Nothing could be more true of the Internet today. We can talk all we want about the "democratic tendencies" of the technology, but who is really interpreting these messages and what in the world are they concluding? We have not a clue. The statistics on Net message distribution, the growth of the number of domain names, the number of individual citizens with Net access, and all of the other widely used data simply gloss over the real, underlying communication. We have created a public rhetoric about democracy anchored in technological mathematics, not in human understanding or cultural interpretation -- not even in civil discourse. We are defining Net-based democracy in terms of transmission, not in terms of actual human communication. In fact, our contemporary public rhetoric about the Gutenbergian revolution does exactly the same. Some commonplaces never change. Luther created chaos before denominational cosmos, and we appear to be doing something very similar with Net culture, sacred and secular. The Net is to democracy what a stadium is to a soccer game. Somebody has to decide how the game is played.

Americans often associate democratic power with the ability of the underdog to triumph over established institutions. They equate egalitarianism with a leveling of power across many individuals or groups in society. Democracy exists, Americans assume, when everyone has an equal voice in defining reality. And we get our own voices by being part of many messages -- by being mass communicators or at least mass consumers. Freedom and symbolic quantity are virtually the same. Therefore, we consider the Internet as the most liberating mass-media technology of all times.

But we are also frequently uncomfortable with the ways that evil or at least arrogant people are able to use the media to advance their own interests. The Net is great, but let’s silence the pornographers, bomb-makers and hackers who are up to no good. What does history tell us about these kinds of debates?

Will the Internet necessarily champion the underdog in culture, or even just in religion? Any inherent propensity of one technology over another to foster democracy is overshadowed by the social institutions in society, including the ways that media are financed, regulated and distributed, and the almost indefinable realities of the individual rhetorical moments when audiences will respond. By about 1470 the cost of a French printed Bible had dropped to about one-fifth of the cost of a manuscript Bible, perhaps giving Calvinism the same kind of boost that Luther had in Germany. As Eisenstein states, "Where indulgence sellers were discredited, Bible salesman multiplied."

Moreover, new power structures and established institutions invariably come to replace the old ones, and any initial glow of inchoate democracy can easily be undermined by the rising centers of symbolic power. Today’s public references about the rise of the printing press tend to overlook the fact that the printing press shifted authority from church to the individual rhetorician. As the church and book owners/collectors lost control of the manuscript culture to the operators of the printing press, they also relinquished much of their authority to individual authors. In short, public personality -- or persona -- became crucially important in mass communication, as it has been ever since. The printing press tended to shift power from the more stable social institutions to the more dynamic and industrious communicators. As a theologian friend of mine likes to say, the medium helped replace one authoritative Catholic pope with many popular Protestant popes.

Finally, the openness of citizens to both democratic opportunities and responsibilities is crucial. Technologies do not produce democracy, even if they bring down the dominant institution or eclipse evil empires. As the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, has said, "Democracy and civil society are two sides of the same coin. Today, when our very planetary civilization is endangered by human irresponsibility, I see no other way to save it than through a general awakening and cultivation of the sense of responsibility people have for the affairs of this world."

The role of the printing press in early-modern Europe shows that the impact of new communications technologies is highly dependent on context. The same technology can affect different social groups and cultures in widely different ways, can unify as well as divide, and can secularize as well spiritualize. There simply is no predetermined impact because of the crucial roles of economics, politics and culture. New media forms do not simply replace older ones. Even after sermons were printed, sermons were still orally delivered. In fact, many people "heard" Luther’s pamphlets read by someone else, both because some of the listeners were not literate and because oral reading was still a significant public act. Preachers often mediated Luther’s writings in the public square, perhaps just as Internet content today is mediated especially by journalists. Printing probably changed the nature of some public discourse, but public discourse, including sermons, itself probably changed how people read or at least how they interpreted the written and printed word. The historical impact of the printing press on religion shows how complex the impacts of new technologies in society really are. Within the Christian church the new technology fragmented theology and ecclesiology, producing Protestantism in all of its variety, dynamism, confusion and contradiction.

But as Eisenstein shows, the same presses "created a new vested interest in ecumenical concord and toleration" -- namely, scientific ways of thinking and knowing. As Luther and other evangelicals used the new technology to preach the gospel-or at least their own version of it-they also encouraged printing and reading per se. Christians’ expanded thirst for reading "tapped a vast reservoir of latent scientific talent by eliciting contributions from reckon-masters, instrument-makers and artist-engineers." As odd as it seems today, this thirst for reading fueled a renewed drive within humankind for a kind of scientific ecumenism, or scientific dogmatism, depending on one’s point of view. Nothing was more important for the rise of scientific communities across geographic space than the printing press. This technology became part of the human quest for a unified approach to mathematics, natural investigation and scholarship in general.

Gutenberg’s investors had no clue about what would eventually happen with the technology they capitalized. On the one hand, science has grown in stature and cross-cultural impact even through the ages of electronic and now digital media. On the other hand, various religious groups have used the Good Book and their own commentaries and other writings to foster alternative views of truth. In fact, some of the most print-based religious groups are the fundamentalists, who often view the scriptures reverently, much the way that some scientists view their textbooks and professional journals. Somewhere in between, or across, these sides of the print divide, science has created an amazing consensus of thought that permeates even modern religious cultures.

Perhaps the internet is doing all of the above and more: encouraging and unifying small religious and other movements; further facilitating scientific unification across geographic proximity, if not also creating new scientific theories and concepts; fostering the rise of new forms of spiritual irrationalism such as those discussed in Wendy Kaminer’s wild book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials; focusing the public even more on particular public personas in news, sports and everything else; creating new classes of investors who are willing to publish online just about anything, regardless of whether or not they agree with it; germinating new technological ideas that are luring capitalists who hold unreasonable expectations of financial bonanzas. The truth is that all kinds of ironic, contradictory and even seemingly regressive things are happening in the Internet world, and we have barely a clue how to interpret it all. We, too, have our Gutenbergs and Luthers and all of the additional characters that make the current times so interesting and challenging. And thank God for contrarians like Albert Borgman (Holding On to Reality) and Stephen Talbott (The Future Does Not Compute), who are helping to highlight the folly of our ways in a digital world.

If God is behind all of this, God surely has a sense of humor. If we are in charge of our own destinies, we are truly "lost in the cosmos," to steal a title from Walker Percy’s marvelous work, subtitled The Last Self-Help Book. But one thing is certain: our utopianism about all of the benefits of the Internet is misguided. We are all in for serendipitous developments and historical reversals that will show us just how important our political, economic, governmental and religious institutions are in shaping the future. I doubt that technology itself will ever deliver more than the level of responsibility that we bring to our modems, our speakers’ platforms and our online and printed publications. Science and technology change, but human nature is remarkably consistent, confusing and confounding.

Writer Jon Katz recently said that news coverage of the Internet lurches "from one extreme to the other." Either the Net is "a dread menace or it’s a Utopian vision." Journalism, he concluded, "has been asleep at the switches," because the Net is "not simply a story about technology, but it’s a revolutionary change in the society and culture." As a result, journalism "is in the sad position of having to play catch-up, if it can."

Perhaps the church is playing catch-up as well. Denominations are perplexed about how to use the Net wisely. Most congregations seem divided about new technologies. Religious periodicals are waiting for the dust to settle, hoping to learn from the success or failure of mainstream media in the digital world. Christian colleges are sauntering into the electronic age just in time to hang onto students who would otherwise follow the technology to schools that promise laptop computers and port-per-pillow networks in dormitories.

Meanwhile, many large parachurch groups are blasting into cyberspace without a clear understanding of the long-term financial costs and organizational demands. Mesmerized by fund-raising potential, they hope to tap into Silicon Valley cash. They smell the fragrant surpluses from successful initial public offerings, stock options and equity stakes. One successful player in the Valley said recently that he wants the church to compete in the big leagues of cyberspace with the "Yahoos" of the world.

Is the church catching up or getting further behind? Do we even know how to define "ahead" and "behind"? To paraphrase Abbott and Costello: "Who’s on first.com?"

Walker Percy contended in Lost in the Cosmos that humankind has lost the connection between reality and perception. Our ability to associate cultural symbols with ultimate referents somehow evaporated over time -- a kind of linguistic devolution, perhaps.

Movie critic and historian Neal Gabler, in his Line new book Life the Movies How Entertainment Conquered Reality, locates the source of Percy’s lament in Hollywood moviemaking. Gabler says that we are witnessing "the triumph of entertainment over life itself." Ironically, his thesis is anchored largely in an electronic world of film and television, while part of the world now travels at breakneck speed into a future of bits, bytes and technoboosterism.

I, too, am lost in the computerized cosmos. But I have an idea about some of the questions that the church should be asking. Maybe if we can discern the right questions, we can begin to unravel the digital complexities of contemporary culture. Then it might be possible to offer a few sane suggestions for congregations, denominations, parachurch organizations, religious media, seminaries and colleges. So here are 20 questions to post on each of Bill Gates’s many doors. (At the rate his behemoth company is buying up digital rights, he will probably own this essay someday, anyway.)

1) What is digitalization doing to community life, including congregations? All the hubbub about "virtual communities" seems to reduce community life to "common interest" and nonincarnational interaction. Wendell Berry anchors community in moral trust and geographic place. I am not willing to reject the value of cyberspace for helping the church to build community, but can we really have community without real location and authentic relationships? We seem to be using the concept of community too loosely and superficially.

2) Who gets to participate in discourse about the digital future? Cyber-gurus are celebrating the "democratic," "inclusive" and "liberating" character of digital technologies. They maybe overstating the case.

Why are so many people around the world excluded from the network -- effectively excommunicated because they lack the technology or the expertise to use it? Few African-Americans are inside Silicon Valley’s power structure. Anthony Walton wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the "glittering cybercities on the hill, the latest manifestation of the American Dream," actually "shed the past and learn to exist without contemplating or encouraging the tragedy of the inner city." In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann says that "the technological culture is the largely unspoken but pivotal issue of liberal democracy."

Within religious institutions we also find remarkable gaps in cyber-authority and cyber-participation. Not all laity are excluded. But the new technologies might be subverting traditional ecclesiastical authority and empowering only selected dissenters within religious institutions. Or they could be cementing existing institutional structures and cloning Silicon Valley’s culture in the church. Which people should we invite to the conversation? Here’s a thought: Could it be that we are excluding the bread-and-butter membership in favor of a new group of techno-prelates who just happen to agree with denominational officials? Paulo Freire’s high-touch experiences with Brazilian literacy programs might teach us how to enfranchise digitally illiterate people in developed societies.

3) What is aesthetically pleasing in a digital world’s spiritual vision? The church has always tried to sacramentalize the faith for real people in an everyday physical world. Christian aesthetics dignifies the ordinary. Will the church capture this sense of spiritual beauty in a cyber age? Is Wired magazine our aesthetic model? What about the fancy new industrial "campuses" where high-tech kids work for their video-game money and where executives display their postmodern art? Where should we stand with church architecture, hymnody, liturgical elements and the like?

To put it oddly, are we still in the entertainment mode of the auditorium or have we moved on to the minimalist world of Dilbert? Maybe the church needs a gifted cartoonist to illuminate the aesthetic plight of congregational workers who are increasingly staring at computer monitors in their corporate-style cubicles. The electronic media celebrated hype and hope. Information culture seems to enjoy poking fun at hypocrisy and hubris. The cyberaesthetic is critical and informal. How should the church respond?

4) What are people’s liturgical expectations in a multimedia world? Perhaps we are moving from liturgy as "integrated show" (the electronic era) to liturgy as "fragmented experience" (the digital "surf"). On the other hand, the growing interest in liturgical renewal seems to reflect a taste for personal and experiential worship. Could digital media revitalize participatory liturgies? One serious seeker sent me an e-mail note requesting information about how to participate in the sacraments online.

5) What do people "hear" in a digital world? If Marshall McLuhan was right, aspects of the spiritual life are disappearing from the church’s religious radar. Changes in the dominant media invariably alter our sensorial perceptions. How will pastors and evangelists reach high-tech people who might be tone-deaf to particular ideas, doctrines and theologies? What is "liberation theology" for baby boomers and Generation Xers who are capitalizing (literally as well as figuratively) on online stock trading and e-commerce? What do computer-gaining kids hear in the world around them -- apart from the ping and pong? I doubt that they easily hear the rhythms of nature or perceive the heavens declaring the glory of the Creator.

6) What is the newly emerging balance among Christian traditions? The visual, emotional TV culture paved the way for the rise of the charismatic movement and the growth of neo-Pentecostalism. Perhaps the textual orientation of cyberspace will reinvigorate the literate modes of Calvinism and other confessional groups. Menlo Park Presbyterian seems to be packing in the Silicon Valley crowd. Do attendees want doctrine? Maybe Eastern Orthodoxy will have its day in the court of cyber-opinion. After all, some people call this the multimedia era.

7) Can digital technology revive cross-generational communication in Christian institutions? The church has adjusted itself almost thoroughly to the ways that the entertainment industry has carved out products for each three-year "generation." Seniors in high school hardly want to share a church education class, let alone a mission trip, with freshmen. Many congregations have a Balkanized "family night" with special videos for each church segment. Now computers offer "individualized instruction" for each church niche. The church looks more and more like a mirror of North America’s fragmented consumer markets.

The faster we extend religious culture across geographic space, the more it seems to dissipate through time. Canadian scholar Harold Adams Innis created a theory of communication based on each medium’s bias toward time or space. He argued that we cannot have it both ways: our communication will tend to support either cultural permanence through time or cultural continuity across geographic space. McLuhan later put a positive spin on Innis’s dire warnings, heralding the Global Village and posthumously becoming the patron saint of Wired magazine. Gates’s new book, The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System, cashes in on McLuhan’s romantic, quasi-theological vision of humankind’s power to overcome space and time. Can new technologies really help us to integrate the various subcultures and demographic breakouts that constitute the church? Or will they worsen our generational fragmentation?

8) What is effective church education in a wired world? New technologies always provide opportunities for the church to reassess its educational mission and techniques, although the surrounding culture tends to dictate how the church will respond. Common-sense thinking says that churches should rev up their newfound techno-gadgets, from DVDs to computer software. Perhaps the technology could actually shift education back to a shared enterprise, in which congregants prepared and produced rather than merely consumed church education.

The church is invariably tied to what happens in public and private education, learning many of its educational habits and sensibilities from the schooling establishment. So where are the schools headed? How will the schools’ rhetoric and praxis shape what happens in the churches? Should the religious community be dialoguing with educational researchers?

In general, the educational establishment seems to be adopting variations on the "technological sublime," believing in the value of teaching without walls and instructors. Some of the emerging educational gurus claim great strides in "teaching content" through the Net and other distance technologies. Maybe so, but what content cannot be measured? What about teacher-student relationships and mentoring, serendipitous as well as prefabricated learning, interpersonal dialogue and discipleship? Could the right digital technology work synergistically with traditional modes of teaching to produce the best of both worlds?

9) Will cyber technologies further integrate the church into mainstream consumer culture? To put it differently, what is holiness in a postmodern world filled with e-commerce and what Daniel Boorstin calls "consumption communities"? If anything, digitalization seems to dissolve distinctions between sacred and secular. Cyberspace itself is filled with many options for religious identity, but they seem to be void of clear propositional and cultural distinctions. One major exception is online cults, such as the Hale Bopp Comet community in San Diego that committed mass suicide in 1996. Cyberspace seems to be encouraging both consumerism and a plethora of anti-consumerism movements.

10) Does digital communication tend to strengthen or weaken people’s religious commitments? Cyberspace seems to divide and unify culture at the same time. Some Christian institutions are using new technologies to revive and reengineer themselves -- to recapture their mission and to recommunicate that mission to themselves and to the world. In fact, the simple task of creating a Web site has forced some churches and perhaps a few denominations to ask themselves who they really are. At the same time, the new technologies have made it far easier for congregants to investigate other, online religions.

11) Does the cyber world favor religious popularization tradition? The rapid growth of Web sites devoted to reclaiming traditional church documents, historical practices and classical literature of faith is extraordinary. Harry Plantinga’s Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://ccel.org) is publishing online and on CD-ROM thousands of non-copyrighted Christian documents, from St. Athanasius and John Donne to C. H. Spurgeon and Dostoevsky. Various church traditions, including the Anabaptist and the Roman Catholic, have established remarkably helpful digital databases of information about their past and current beliefs. But the majority of popular Christian Web sites seems to be lost in the digital ether, with no sense of their own location in religious time and space. They reflect the entrepreneurial spirit of popular religion -- pragmatic and creative, even if historically disconnected or theologically unsophisticated.

12) What kind of witness is the church in digital culture? To put it more starkly, what does the world think of Christian faith as expressed in cyberspace? We now know what happened with the televangelists. Many viewers acquired a festering, lingering distrust of the church, especially Christians’ forays into politics and fund raising. The most popular religious Web site, the Gospel Communications Network (http://www.gospelcom.net), banned both fund raising and politics when it began in 1995. Should the rest of the digital church go the same route? What would an authentic Christian presence look like on Web-TV, DVD or the Net?

The problem, of course, is that digital media are highly varied, and the church will not be able very easily to limit its witness to one time or group. Cyberspace, in particular, seems to foster the cacophony of Babel more than the rhetorical precision of Mars Hill.

13) How might we use new technologies to reinvigorate religious dialogue rather than merely to exacerbate mass’ media’s tendency toward monologue? All the hoopla about online chat aside, there might be some opportunities for enlivening discourse among seminary students and faculty, within congregations, across denominations and perhaps even between different Christian groups around the world, Here’s a cosmic thesis: the most interactive technologies, and the most dialogic uses of technologies, offer the greatest potential for both evangelism and community. Therefore, in a digital age we must address not only the role of high-tech monologue, but also how to reinvigorate interpersonal dialogue, where authenticity and trust merge into incarnated relationships. Without a counterbalance, high-tech religious communication could disenfranchise high-touch, lay-driven ministry. Transmission is not the same as communication.

14) Will digital developments help the church recognize and reclaim its God-given responsibility as a caretaker of Creation? Gabler’s critique of entertainment culture argues that North Americans create their lives in the image of popular culture. Fair enough. But perhaps entertainment offers a particular vision of the relationship between humankind and the Creation. In the electronic milieu, we tend to become watchers of Creation -- what novelist Jerzy Kosinski once called "videots." Maybe digital media could empower religious groups to become producers of shalom. In any case, our relationship with the physical world will now be mediated through digital technologies, for good and for bad.

15) What kinds of regulatory policies would best serve church and society? The current telecommunications frenzy, is based largely on a "high" communication policy that values rapid, long-distance transmission and devalues local, slow, dialogic communication. In fact, it’s getting cheaper and easier to consume digital messages from afar, and comparatively more expensive to make a telephone call to a friend one town over in a different area code. Do current regulations favor international media conglomerates at the expense of local, traditional and distinct cultures?

Some postmodern critics suggest that the digital landscape may be little more than a seductive buzz of messages from no one in particular to everyone in general. Is this what society and church want or need? If not, what kinds of regulatory standards could also facilitate a "low" policy that respects existing cultures, encourages critical discourse, values history and empowers even religious institutions? The church has an enormous stake in both how the telecommunications market functions and who determines communications policy.

16) How can theological education use the new technologies wisely? So far I see little wisdom in most of the rhetoric about educating seminarians for the 21st century and creating effective distance-education programs. Not that these are bad goals. But seminaries first have to determine appropriate educational uses of new technologies. How can different media forms be combined synergistically? Which technologies will produce long-lasting impact rather than short-term techno-sizzle? Seminaries face tremendously important stewardship issues because there is only so much technology, money and expertise to go around. Wisdom is sparse.

The current cap between ministers and most seminaries on this issue is like the Grand Canyon. Pastors generally seek practical advice, whereas seminaries are part of an academic enterprise with its own culture and agendas. The gap between lay leaders and theological institutions is probably even more staggering. What should seminaries be teaching about contemporary culture and technology? Where is the historical and -- dare we say it? -- theological wisdom about media technology? How can seminaries address the synergistic value of print, oral, electronic and digital culture for proclaiming the gospel, building the church community and educating the clergy and laity? In a digital world, we may all witness the collapse of formerly compelling distinctions between high and low culture, theological education and spiritual formation, and theory and praxis. Perhaps these kinds of Enlightenment distinctions have their course. What do we have to offer in their stead -- beyond the knee-jerk glorification or condemnation of technology?

17) What are the most compelling forms of communication in a digital universe of discourse? Some observers have suggested that electronic and digital technologies are fostering a new kind of oral culture -- reviving the place of discussion groups (e.g., coffeehouses and salons). In fact, growing numbers of digitally savvy people seem interested in reading books as well as surfing the Net. To begin to get a handle on these developments, we should probably re-listen to Ivan Illich and Parker Palmer, among others.

Digitalization seems to have revitalized an interest in many earlier forms of communication. Adult writing groups and reading clubs are springing up in digital cities across the continent, and reportedly in other high-tech areas such as New Zealand and Australia. Perhaps we are not amusing ourselves to death, contrary to what Neil Postman argues. Clearly the shibboleths about the "death of print," the "end of reading" and "the decline of young people’s ability to express themselves verbally" are oversimplifications at best. If anything, we seem to be in the midst of a kind of symbolic renaissance that is resuscitating as well as transforming many kinds of human discourse.

I wonder if theologians ought to be teaching partly with novels. If pastors ought to be seeing more films to expand their visual-narrative repertoire. If Christian publishers ought to be searching seriously for the next generation of essayists and story crafters rather than putting so much emphasis on Bible-study tomes and self-help books. Walker Percy subtitled Lost in the Cosmos "The Last Self-Help Book." How can we open up God’s Creation to more real God-talk and less noise and especially less self-talk?

18) How do religions groups learn about each other in this digital cosmos? Religious stereotypes exist in a mass-mediated world. As Walter Lippmann said in his groundbreaking book Public Opinion, humans act in the real world on the basis of the perceptions created increasingly for us by the media’s pseudo-environment. Now cyberspace is creating new pseudo-environments that mediate between religious groups. Virtually anyone with a theological axe to grind or a stereotype to promote can have his or her stage in the digital limelight. The Net empowers the kooks and well-intentioned fanatics as well as the charitable people who are quick to listen and slow to speak. Some Net enthusiasts rhapsodize about the coming of McLuhan’s Global Village, when in fact the fractures and fissures among religious groups are as strong as ever.

Perhaps the digital changes are also opening up new opportunities for cross-denominational collaboration. In a world in which different groups are one hyperlink away from each other online, the church might be able to foster fellowship and coordinate projects across the ethnic, racial, geographic and denominational canyons.

19) Is the church uncritically adopting the public rhetoric about the so-called "digital revolution"? Cyberspace creates a fine line between science fiction and popular theology, especially eschatology. Surely the millennial spirit has captivated many believers. Are Christians also carriers of the misplaced utopian rhetoric? Is the church even one of the major purveyors of what James W. Carey calls the "technological sub-lime" and what Jacques Ellul called "la technique"? Perhaps we face new kind of religious syncretism that combines digital fever with the worship of Creation.

At the same time, we should question knee-jerk criticisms of cyberspace, especially when we baptize secular critiques with quasi-theological rhetoric. Revolutions are never wholly good or bad. And new media forms never replace older ones. Printing did not replace conversation, and electronic media did not eliminate printing or in-the-flesh worship. Cyberspace will not eclipse the Eucharist or destroy Protestant hymnody, although it might frustrate a lot of liturgists and composers!

History suggests that the real revolution -- if we should call it that -- is far more subtle and profound: new media forms change how people use earlier media forms. If I am remotely correct, people in a digital world may read, preach, converse and publish more or less differently, but they will not refrain from these earlier practices, We might learn to read aloud instead of just silently, to write oral sermons instead of academic lectures (and there is a difference), to illustrate our lectures with slides as well as blackboard scribbles, and to dialogue with students instead of just lecturing. But we will not stop communicating through earlier media forms.

Instead, we must figure out new ways of building collective religious identities and nurturing spiritual disciplines, "using all of the means reasonably at our disposal," to paraphrase Aristotle. We are intimacy-seeking creatures, predisposed to reach out to others and to learn. We forge new media today as we have always done as part of the unfolding of God’s Creation.

20) What other questions should Christians be asking about the digital cosmos? Where do we go from here? Is there any hope for the church to seek wisdom both in and about the new combination of media at its disposal? Our task is to forge an intelligent middle ground between the "dread menace" and the "Utopian vision." The Fall hangs over cyberspace like a silicon shadow. Shall we look for grace?