Articles – Page 315 – Religion Online

The Greatest Songs

Paul was a newly minted seminary graduate and not much acquainted with the ways of the world when he arrived at his congregation just in time to conduct the wedding of one of the parish’s leading daughters. He had done well in his Biblical Introduction courses and had exhibited real skill in his worship leadership. It seemed that, although this was a major social and ecclesiastical event, he was up to the challenge.

After careful liturgical planning, Paul decided to read a passage from the Song of Solomon. And who could blame him? Passages from the Song of Solomon have been read at weddings for centuries. This is passionate and wonderful poetry growing from the love of a woman for a man and a man for a woman. What could be more meaningful on a day when the total commitment of two people to one another is recognized and honored before God and the assembled witnesses?

Something was different on this day, however, and Paul in his naiveté was both a contributor to the disaster and totally unaware that it was coming. As he began with verse two of chapter one, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out; therefore the maidens love you," there was a noticeable stirring in the congregation. From their perspective, Paul was clearly enjoying this kind of poetry in a way no one expected. Perhaps it was just the warmth of the afternoon, or the excitement of the moment, or the clear affection which the happy couple held for each other, or perhaps it was that Paul had over-prepared for this reading or was finding some human joy for himself in the intoxicating words. Whatever it was the congregation was uncomfortable because the whole thing sounded so ‘smutty’ and their new pastor was apparently having a good time. The wedding is still remembered as a great success and the happy couple are still happy but Paul has never quite been able to shed the reputation of being a ‘sexy’ pastor nor has he been able to figure out what went wrong that day.

The more worldly wise among us know exactly what went wrong. Paul picked up on the fact that the Song of Solomon is an earthy, direct, heartfelt description of human love, apparently written by a woman. While sections of the Song may be read at weddings, most of us avoid the realities described by making this series of poems into a description of the way in which Jesus loves his Church. When we hear it read out loud we don’t think of a dark comely maiden running off with her lover for an afternoon tryst; we think of Christ coming to celebrate the Church in a situation in which its warts have become the occasion for descriptions of its glorious beauty.

Such an allegorical reading is not without its historical precedent. As far back as the gathering of the Targum, an interpretive paraphrase of the Old Testament in Aramaic, the Song of Solomon was described as a poetic history of God’s redeeming love for his people from the time of the Exodus down through the Exile and restoration. Christian scholars followed in the same vein making Christ the lover and protector of the Church. In the current era of privatized religion, this mode of interpretation has led to believing that the Song is basically about the way in which Jesus loves me as an individual, even to the point of overlooking my faults in order to praise my inner and outer beauty. Reading the Song at a wedding for many people is not so much a celebration of human love as it is a statement of God’s Providential care for the newlyweds as they begin the perilous journey of marriage. Clearly, the Song has been used in many allegorical interpretations. John of the Cross, for example, used the Song in the sixteenth century as the basis for a classic Spanish poem, "Spiritual Canticle," which he composed while he was in prison. In the Song he saw the promise of God’s redeeming love as the guarantee that the beauty, peace order, passion and fellowship of the Garden of Eden would be restored at the right time.

Scholarship suggests that the Song was not composed by King Solomon, despite the attribution in 1:1. The point of view is that of a woman and it describes a kind of unbridled rebellious passion which might only have been expressed by a woman, living in the controlled atmosphere of the royal court, perhaps even the court of Solomon himself. As such it is the only book in the Bible which has a woman’s voice. Even the books of Esther and Ruth which are written about women, are not the experiences or the feelings of the women themselves.

What if this was a book by a woman for women? What difference would that make in the way it is read and heard? Well, for one thing it would say that women are fully capable of feeling and expressing themselves in ways which go far beyond the boundaries created for them in a male-dominated society. In the Song, the woman describes the depths of her affections and frustrations and the ways she deals with them without regard to the conventions of her culture. This is a liberated woman who throws caution to the wind in pursuit of her lover and who relishes the attention that he bestows on her. Like any good poet she uses rich imagery - animal and plants and spices to describe her love, and the message is there for all who will read: this is not a woman who will be stopped in her pursuit of what she wants.

In the Song there are some indications that beyond the conventions of culture there are other obstacles that these young lovers must overcome. Renita Weems in The Women’s Bible Commentary finds reason to believe that there were racial or economic issues that made it difficult for this young couple to find marital bliss. Early in chapter 1 there is reference to the woman’s being black and later, in chapter 5, the Daughters of Jerusalem, a rather critical chorus, raise questions as to the appropriateness of this man for her.

If Dr. Weems is right, this book is in part a call to action against the societal restrictions and prohibitions which would keep lovers apart. It is a cry for an end to all the arbitrary ways in which we categorize people so as to keep them in the little boxes we have created for them. The Song then becomes perhaps the first of the many sections of Scripture which challenge us to see people for what they are and to treat them all as brothers and sisters, if not in Christ then at least in our common ancestry through Adam and Eve.

At the fancy wedding, Paul, the young pastor, apparently found the words he needed to express his human passion and he did so in a way which frightened those who keep desire at arm’s length. He may also have discovered that the Song of Solomon, often called the Greatest of Songs, lifts the soul beyond the ‘thou shalts and thou shalt nots’ of our pedestrian lives and gives us courage to confront and challenge the barriers that limit women and the assumptions that limit all who are different.

Perhaps Paul will read from the Song with less conviction the next time. Perhaps he will also choose to read passages from the Song on occasions of compelling social action.

Religious Broadcasting at the Crossroads

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Whatever else one may think of them, one thing must be admitted: evangelical broadcasters have thrust the church into the electronic age. Their aggressive use of television, communication satellites, computers and mass marketing practices has created an array of effects and implications with which the church is still grappling.

It would be good to have a little theological breathing space in which to consider some of these implications. Such a grace appears not to be granted us. The futuristic scenarios in technological communication which once were the stuff of science fiction are rapidly becoming present realities, and the broadcasters are just as quickly adapting them to their purposes.

While the evangelical broadcasters have demonstrated an aptitude for using these innovations, however, they have not yet demonstrated a corresponding aptitude for justifying theologically the validity of their enterprise and some of the compromises which have been made in order to adapt to the demands of these new technologies. Perhaps as technical entrepreneurs that is not their responsibility. But for the church as a whole a theological evaluation of the promise and dangers of electronic technology is critical: as human society rapidly becomes an extended electronic network, it is imperative that the church’s response be guided by clear theological insights and not mere opportunism.

While it is unlikely that the electronic world will stop while the theologians get on, a valuable historical perspective has recently emerged, one that offers the opportunity to view and evaluate the effectiveness of current Christian uses of mass media. Trends in the syndication and audiences of evangelical television programs over the past few years indicate that the much-heralded development of the evangelical use of television has reached its peak, so that Christian broadcasting as a whole now stands at a crossroads and is poised to move in a new direction.

Audience figures gathered for the past ten years indicate that the combined audience size for all syndicated religious programs reached a peak of growth in 1977-78. This pattern is reflected in both Arbitron and Nielsen audience survey figures. Since then the combined audience for these programs has been fluctuating, but it is still below the level for 1977-78. Because the major portion of current religious broadcasting is made up of nationally syndicated programs, the pattern indicates market saturation by religious programs. That is, it appears that religious television shows have reached the point at which they are now largely attracting the segment of the total television population that is going to be attracted by the present formats and contents. While there has been some movement in the sizes of audiences for different programs -- some have been increasing while others have been decreasing -- the total combined audience for all programs reflects the saturation point.

This marketing reality has several implications for religious broadcasting as a whole. First, it places us in a position from which we can begin to evaluate the effectiveness of the evangelical broadcasting strategy. This is a most useful historical perspective. No longer can these broadcasters’ shortcomings be excused by saying, “Ah, but they’re still growing!” The youth has grown into an adult, and we can see what he looks like. What we see is this: evangelical broadcasting has become a specialized programming service for a specialized audience. The overwhelming majority of the regular audience of evangelical television programs are people who are already evangelical Christians, further distinguished by other, more specialized characteristics such as frequent use of Scripture and other devotional materials, regular attendance at midweek as well as Sunday church activities and meetings, and residence in southern states.

These audience characteristics come as no surprise to those acquainted with general mass communication theory and practice. Television is a selective medium, and any program’s audience is determined to a large degree by the nature of the content. The more general the content, the more general the audience; the more specific the content, the more defined the audience. Evangelical programs appear to have succeeded very rapidly in attracting their appropriate audience. The specific nature of their content has largely excluded other viewing groups.

The syndication patterns of evangelical programs reflect a similarly limited penetration of the general television population. Though some of the programs are broadcast in almost every market in the country, religious programs in general are to be found clustered in areas that already display a high degree of religious interest and church affiliation: on Sunday mornings, in geographical areas of high church attendance, and on stations recognized as being “religious” in their format. If evangelical programs are intended to reach the nonbelievers and the unconvinced, there is little evidence of these programs’ ability to get out where the nonbelievers are. Of course there are recognizable economic reasons for these phenomena, but they serve not to justify but simply to illuminate the problem.

To understand fully the implications of this market saturation, one must consider the historical context of evangelical broadcasting in the past 15 years. Evangelical paid-time programming has virtually taken over the religious broadcast field, displacing almost all other types of religious broadcasting. It has justified this takeover by suggesting that with its independent financial resources, gained through audience support, it has been able to overcome the limitations experienced by mainline broadcasting -- which was dependent on the television industry for production facilities and free public-service air time. By strong audience cultivation and solicitation, evangelical broadcasters claim they have been able to buy their way out of the religious ghetto and resist pressures to modify their strong doctrinal content.

The recent trends in syndication and audiences of Christian programs suggest that the evangelical strategy has also failed. While evangelical broadcasters have apparently been very successful in raising money, building large organizations and support services and providing sophisticated religious programming for evangelical viewers, they have not demonstrated any greater ability to get their message across to the general television population.

Some broadcasters recognize these limitations and see the overcoming of them as the challenge of this new decade. Tom Bisset, manager of an evangelical radio station, suggests that the challenges of the future for evangelical broadcasting include reaching nonevangelicals, speaking prophetically to current issues, and upgrading program content (Christianity Today, Sept. 4, 1981). Ironically, evangelical broadcasters in the 1950s criticized mainline broadcasting for these same deficiencies. What is not readily admitted is that if these qualities were not present in evangelical broadcasting at its zenith, it is not likely that they will be developed in its wane.

Part of the problem has been evangelicals’ unwillingness to take seriously the limitations of television as a means of religious communication. They have been so enamored of its potential that, like a lovesick adolescent, they have been blind to its faults. Television is a highly selective medium, and people choose to watch largely on the basis of their existing interests. This selectivity is magnified in the case of cable television -- so that while the development of cable may offer greater potential for Christian communication, it also presents greater limitations.

It is once again becoming obvious that if one is to gain a large non-Christian audience for a Christian program one must depend either on stealth (hiding the gospel in the guise of entertainment or some other subterfuge) or accident (the viewer’s flipping of the dial). There is evidence to indicate that stealth and accident do supply a certain number of non-Christian viewers for most programs. However, research indicates also that the sustained effect of television programs on these viewers is very limited. Although evangelical broadcasters promote dramatic examples of respondents to their programs, the general response does not lead to involvement in an ongoing Christian group or to apparent changes in ethical behavior. Christian broadcasting may have some effects, but effectiveness in evangelism in its fullest sense is not one of them.

The saturation of the religious television market has a second implication for religious broadcasting as a whole. Evangelical broadcasters are now faced with the need to meet ever-increasing costs and heavy financial commitments with a declining -- or, at best, level -- base of financial support. This pressure is greatest for those broadcasters who are dependent on audience support -- and the situation is likely to become worse. As other church bodies such as the United Methodist, the Southern Baptist and the Roman Catholic begin to develop their own programming in an effort to regain the support of their own adherents, the segmented audience for religious programs is likely to become more segmented and the battle for the loyalty of supportive viewers even more frantic.

At this crossroads in their development, broadcasters appear to be faced with several possible options. One is to maintain the present level of religious content in their programs and to tolerate the inevitable drop in audience and development because of the increasing market fragmentation. This option would appear consistent with the evangelical concern for lack of compromise in content -- “Woe is me if I preach not the gospel.”

Such a decision could result in a major retrenchment of activity. Because audience loyalty to these programs has been built so much on images of growth and success as indicators of God’s direct blessing, cutbacks could have psychological as well as theological implications, producing a further loss of support even from loyal viewers. Nobody wants to back a losing horse. It is possible, therefore, that some broadcasters may show signs of becoming “established,” consolidating basic identities and service functions, and developing as extended independent church organizations in line with their particular theological emphases.

Another alternative is for audience-supported broadcasters to try to develop alternate bases of revenue in an effort to stabilize their vacillating audience dependence. Those broadcasters who have previously invested excess income in revenue-producing activities such as their own stations or other industries appear to be in a healthier position than others who have invested in liabilities such as buildings or dependent schools. Unless the broadcaster has already developed such activities, however, it may be too late to consider such an option.

A third option which broadcasters may choose is to try to expand their audience base. One way of doing this is to expand international activities, and there are indications that broadcasters are pursuing this route more actively. It is unlikely, however, that overseas audiences will be as supportive as U.S. audiences have been. Another way to expand one’s audience base is to offer a less specific religious content that would appeal to a broader group of Christians, or even non-Christians. Some evangelical broadcasters are beginning to thus broaden their message. The Christian Broadcasting Network, for example, has recently expanded the format of the “700 Club,” now including, among other features, a regular segment on home decorating and the decor of luxury hotels and vacation spots. One can observe on occasion the interesting phenomenon of the “700 Club” host carefully restraining an overzealous guest in order to maintain the new, less religious format. CBN has also been increasing the amount of secular programming on its Boston station in order to build a general audience and increase advertising revenue; this is no doubt a network-wide strategy.

While one can appreciate the managerial dynamics behind these changes, the implications for religious broadcasting are profound. One of the persistent criticisms of mainline religious programs made in the past by evangelicals was that the mainline programs had compromised their message and lacked distinctive gospel content. The evangelicals now appear to have been forced into the same compromise -- not for theological reasons, but almost solely for economic ones. This compromise illustrates again the awesome leveling and censoring power of the television industry.

This problem illuminates the deficiency of the evangelical strategy. Evangelicals’ strength has been in their preaching enthusiasm and their technological enterprise. But they have been deficient in sound theological reflection on the nature of technology. The recent trends and research indicate that the upsurge of evangelical broadcasting in the 1970s has not resolved but simply postponed the inevitable Christian confrontation with technology and its role in the communication of the Christian faith. The danger to the church at the moment is that we will continue to ignore these questions and persist in what Frederick Ferré calls our “technolatry,” the belief that “every apparent evil brought on by technique is to be countered by yet greater faith in technique” (Shaping the Future [Harper & Row, 19761, p. 43).

In the light of these limitations it is disturbing to note some recent movements within the mainline churches. The United Methodist Church has begun raising funds to finance extensive television programming. The Southern Baptist Convention recently announced its intention to purchase its own network of stations. The Roman Catholic Church has begun its own programming network. None of these activities has indicated a new strategy to deal with the implications of television programming in general or to counter the demonstrated limitations of television communication. They appear mainly as a counterdefense by these churches -- an attempt to procure their fair slice of the religious television pie. Judging by the initial United Methodist program, it appears that the Methodists are prepared to mimic the evangelicals in order to seek their fair share. While such efforts may be commended for breaking into the monopoly held by the independent evangelical organizations, they must be deplored for their lack of imagination in tackling the persistent problems of the religious use of television.

These efforts will simply tend to reinforce the convenient pigeonholing of religious faith by television and the image of religious faith as just another programming option.

It is apparent that if television is to be used realistically by the church in the future, several directions need to be taken.

1. There must be a more adequate definition of the relationship of religious broadcasting to the total mission of the church.

The evangelical attitude in the past has been to exaggerate the contribution which television can make to the mission of the church. An evaluation of recent achievements and trends indicates that while television must be taken seriously by the church, its direct application to the church’s mission is limited. It is not a panacea for the church’s problems, and its use must form only a part of the total communication strategy of any church. Yet this relationship has rarely been defined.

While religious broadcasters have continually said that their task is to supplement the work of the local church, there is little evidence of a sustained attempt by broadcasters to do this. A study of the content of the major programs shows little reference to the local church and its importance in the Christian life. Research also indicates that only a small percentage of respondents to programs are referred to local churches, and an even smaller percentage end up developing their initial experience within the life of a church.

2. The specific objectives of each Christian use of television must be elaborated.

It is deceptive and counterproductive to the cause of Christ’s Kingdom to raise millions of dollars for evangelistic efforts which hardly touch non-Christians. It is destructive to spend millions running an independent computerized counseling service for people who have a church and pastor around the corner. It is counterproductive to the body of Christ to have a celebrity perform the same functions by television which are being performed faithfully but less dramatically by a non-celebrity in one’s local community.

There are valuable complementary functions which can be provided by religious television if its concern is genuinely to be a servant to the church and not just to lay a base for its own perpetuation.

3. Equal attention needs to be given to a strong educational program within the church to enable Christians to control their addiction to electronic technology.

Christ’s concern for individuals enslaved by the products of their sinful condition should be motivation enough for Christians to concern themselves for people today -- who are increasingly demonstrating signs of electronic narcosis, with consequent effects of isolation, alienation, fear, abnegation of responsibility and loss of joy. The answer does not lie in transferring their narcosis from non-religious to religious programs: it lies in liberation from dependence on mediated experience and escapist material. As one of the few remaining personal, interactive communities, the church has a unique opportunity to embody the redemptive love of Christ.

4. Christians should develop a strong critique of television content in general.

While some attention has been drawn to the Christian critique of sex and violence in television programming, the critique must also include other dehumanizing aspects such as consumerism, limited access for such groups as minorities and older people and the continuing exploitation of children and youth.

The effectiveness of this critique is substantially weakened when Christian programs, in their effort to be seen as relevant and sophisticated, adopt the same images of glamor and success.

5. An ongoing “watchdog” program of research and debate is needed to ensure that our television communication remains faithful to the faith we have received.

Each form of communication technology imposes its own order on what it communicates, both because of its electronic characteristics and its economic organization. Any new expression of the gospel must be continually evaluated to determine the extent to which it remains congruent with the gospel’s essential message. This process of apologetic and dogmatic has formed the dynamic of the history of Christian thought. The adaptation of the gospel to television is no different.

Religious broadcasting is at a crossroads. We have the opportunity to view and evaluate the effectiveness of both mainline and evangelical strategies, and to move in a new direction. It remains to be seen whether we have the wisdom and courage to master the medium, or whether we will fall victim to its awesome power.

The Media and Violence: Needed – a Paradigm for Public Policy

In the past two years there have been three major investigations into violence in Australian society. Each of them are examining or have examined, to different extents, the role played by violence on the media.

On 11th January, 1988 the Social Development Committee of the Victorian Parliament was requested by the Governor in Council "to inquire into, consider and report to Parliament on strategies to deal with community violence." Among its brief was the request to examine "the portrayal of violent behaviour in the mass media and entertainment industries, and to review existing codes of practice for the reporting of violent crime in the mass media." The Committee recently completed its enquiry, producing three reports, the first of which lead to the establishment in July 1989 of a Community Council on Violence within the Ministry for Police and Emergency Services. Other recommendations are still before the Parliament.

On 22nd August 1988, the Federal Minister for Transport and Communications directed the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal to hold an enquiry into "the portrayal, presentation and reporting of violence on television" and "the most appropriate method of ensuring that proper consideration is given by licensees to the suitability ..... of violent material in television programming." Submissions were invited and research commissioned to determine community attitudes and perceptions of violence shown on television. The Tribunal Committee was holding public conferences during August and September 1989 to gain further public response to specific proposals gained from the submissions and research.

On 16th October 1988, the Federal Minister for Justice announced the establishment of a National Committee on Violence, a joint Commonwealth-State initiative with a wide-ranging brief "to inquire into and report on violent crime and violence generally in Australian society (and) recommend preventive strategies." The Committee is expected to make its final report to the Prime Minister and the Premiers by the end of 1989.

The catalyst for this plethora of enquiries was the growing community concern that violence in Australia was on the increase, stimulated particularly by the multiple murders in Hoddle Street and Queen Street in Victoria in late 1987 and the proximate massacre in Hungerford in the U.K. The general community shock that followed these events found expression in a strong suspicion that the media, particularly the television and video industry, contributed significantly to these and other expressions of social violence through the heavily violent nature of much of their news and entertainment programming. Each of the enquiries was set up soon after these events.

These enquiries will need to address the theoretical question of the role played by video and television portrayals of violence in community violence and criminal behaviour? Even though this has been one of the most heavily studied topics in communication research internationally for more than fifty years, no conclusive answer has been found and no clear policy direction for dealing with it has been forthcoming. While community passion and suspicion following traumatic events may be an effective motivator for getting enquiries started, passion and suspicion alone have been found to be ineffectual in sustaining the subsequent detailed re-examination and reformulation of complex social policy and commercial practice.

Once the passion dies down, however, thoughtful reflection alone indicates that the situation is not that simple.

First, while the media are highly visible social institutions and the frequent targets of community concern, it is apparent that they also are products of the society. They draw their symbols of violence -- and in the case of news their incidents of violence -- from within the host culture. Long before television and videos entered the scene Australia had a strong tradition of violence running through its history: from the European invasion and slaughter of aboriginal inhabitants two hundred years ago, through the treatment of convicts, its ANZAC traditions and readiness to fight other people's wars, and parts of its sporting tradition.

Second, while censorship of the media appears to be a desirable way to reduce the portrayal of violence, it is not an easy solution to implement. Advocating censorship as a solution ignores the complexity of associated issues of freedom of speech and questions of imposition of one particular set of moral values in a socially and morally pluralistic society.

Third, applying simple legislative solutions to complex social issues also seems attractive, but ignores other relevant factors such as the role of the family and parental supervision, the place of education, and broader social determinants such as employment and access to social and economic opportunity.

For this reason enquiries into media violence have a poor historical record. In the U.S.A., for example, there have been the 1928 National Committee for the Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures, the decade-long Senate hearings on the role of the media in juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, the 1968 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, and the 1972 Surgeon-General's Scientific Advisory Committee's Report on Television and Social Behaviour. All invested significant resources into researching the relationship between different media and social violence. They all brought forth inconclusive findings, could find no sound and clear basis for legislative decision-making, and had little significant effect on industry practices. The continuous analysis of programme content by communication researchers such as George Gerbner shows that the levels of gratuitous violence in U.S. television are as high as ever.

What then should policy-makers do in response to genuine expressions of community concern? Are these enquiries destined to be merely band-aid measures, established so that governments of the day can be seen to be doing something and as an opportunity for concerned community groups, professionals and academics to let off some steam?

It is obvious that the media of communication have some role to play in the development and shape of a society's life and functioning, but how can that role be adequately conceptualised in order to formulate policy that protects the social fabric from abuses while enhancing positive aspects of the relationship?

One of the key factors in this is the conceptual model used in understanding the connection between media and society. A major problem is that the dominant models which have been used historically for evaluating the foundations for social policy are inadequate for handling the complexity of the situation. This is seen in two ways.

For example, the dominant model reflected in the society at large for understanding media effects is still the old one of imitation. Fed by success stories of advertising campaigns and occasional stories of individuals acting out bizarre incidents seen on television or in movies, a large part of the community believe that television and videos major effect on social behaviour is a direct one, whereby programme material is either directly imitated or directly undermines social morality. A model such as this may explain the widespread demand for action against the media following bizarre and traumatic events such as the Hoddle Street and Queen Street murders.

The problem is that while the imitation model may be useful and perhaps even accurate in particular individual situations, it is totally inadequate as a model for policy-formulation on a societal level. It is obvious that even in these extreme situations any particular medium is only one contributory factor and treating extremes as the norm is a totally inadequate basis for legislation.

The danger of resorting to the imitation model because of its aptness in an individual situation, is that when the complexities of the situation become apparent, and because no adequate alternative model for policy formulation has been developed, purposeful action is not possible.

While regulation of media content has not been as simplistic, historically policy-makers have suffered from similar inadequacies in conceptual formulations. Policy-making in media regulation, particularly in the U.S. and to a large extent also in Australia, proceeds generally by forming, or at least undergirding, political decisions on the same "objective" and "scientific" basis developed for less ambiguous areas such as public engineering, economics, and regulation of public safety. The assumption (and hope) has been that if the physical sciences could provide a clear picture of the universal and objective laws on which physical reality could be harnessed for economic benefit, then the same mathematical, quantitative methods could be used by the human and social sciences to discover the objective laws of human behaviour as a basis for social engineering and policy-making.

When faced with a substantial issue such as media and violence, therefore, the first step has been for policy-makers to try to establish a clear, empirical and "objective" body of "facts" as the basis for their decision-making. This approach to the issue of media and violence has been demonstrated historically to be inadequate, for a number of reasons.

The empirical method of sub-division, isolation and measurement of individual variables, while successful with some policy applications, has been found to be totally inadequate to handle the large number of complex and inter-related behavioural variables that are present in any communication situation. It is even less adequate to the task of enabling prediction of consequences as a basis for evaluating various policy options. The current state of ferment within communication research theory itself is an indication of the collapse of confidence in the ability of adopted empirical methodologies alone to handle the complexities of the situation.

Looking primarily to models based on quantitative research methodologies to provide a clear direction for policy in regulating media and violence can also distract policy makers from coming to grips with other difficult but more important value questions that impinge on the issue of media and violence, such as the purpose of broadcasting, issues of ownership and control of media, the international context of Australian media, the dominant economic nature of most of Australia's social communications, the distinctive ways in which the media reproduce and reconstruct myths and symbols of violence from within the culture, and how audiences use and respond to media myths and symbols.

Needed: a new paradigm

What is needed, therefore, is a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between media and society. It needs to be one that has sufficient breadth to integrate the many factors which affect the media within society, but which also has sufficient definition to enable intentional and constructive policy development to meet specific problems. The paradigm needs also to be able to integrate the many insights which have come through the vast amount of empirical effects research without becoming tied to the limited societal perspectives of that research model.

One way to proceed may be to begin to reconceptualise the relationship between media and society on an environmental model rather than an individual causative one. Within such a paradigm we would begin to analyse an issue such as media and violence in terms of its effects first on the broader symbolic environment that is needed for constructive social life, rather than just on isolated and selected individual actions. Some parallels may be drawn.

Regulation of the natural environment does not proceed on the assumption that humans are solely responsible for the hazards of life. We are not solely responsible for the hazards we encounter in life; our environment contains many naturally occurring hazards to which we constantly adjust. Similarly most poisons and diseases occur naturally. But the intentional gathering of humans into concentrated communities produces distinctive characteristics which have severe implications for what is assumed to be a desirable natural environment.

Similarly, seeing the mass media in relation to our common symbolic environment would not assume that the mass media alone are responsible for violence within society. But it does provide a basis for considering the implications for our shared symbolic environment of the particular intentional concentrations of selected images resulting from the media's distinctive economic, technological, and structural characteristics.

Nor does environmental law always operate on the basis of direct individual effect. If I dump hazardous material into the ocean I am accountable, not because there will be people who can be proven to have directly ingested it, but because in doing so I am a contributor to a broader class of action which has been deemed to have an undesirable anti-social effect. This broader class of action even allows for individual differences in vulnerability: some people may be affected whereas others will have greater resistance. Care of the environment even allows for aesthetics, such as the preservation of particular trees or prohibitions against dropping innocuous rubbish simply because it looks bad.

To reconceive the issue of media and violence in such terms may be a more productive paradigm for development of future directions in research and discussion. Such a paradigm could incorporate the extensive insights gained through empirical research while avoiding the futility of trying to prove sole cause. It also could provide a means whereby other influential factors could be investigated and addressed, such as differences in the social and economic purposes of broadcasting, the social sources of violence and how media portrayals interact with those causes, how the restraints and traditions of media production cause the media to pick up particular cultural images while ignoring others, and how particular audiences respond to and use media images.

"Forms of violence have been a perennial dimension of human and social existence. Even when it does not erupt in war, riots or criminal aggression, it is lurking beneath the surface in personal and national ambitions, in social injustice and in myriad individual or social frustration. Much of human history is the attempt to come to grips with this fact of human history. Inevitably the 'media', whether in epic folktale, Greek or Shakespearean drama or TV, take up that dark side of human potential which is violence."(1)

To try to suppress this aspect of human experience by censoring it could have quite undesirable consequences. The media in this sense mirror what is in our humanity. For that reason it is inadequate to deal with the issue of media and violence within a framework that deals with the media in isolation and by attempting to prove media culpability. The attempt has failed in the past, and to try to do so again merely detracts from the important task of constructing a more adequate alternative by which the conceive the issue.

That does not mean ignoring the role of the media. While the media mirror what is in our humanity, they are in a quite distinctive position of power within the society and while they should not be blamed for the whole picture, they can rightly be held to account for the important role they play within the whole. The questions that need to be asked, therefore, are in what ways do the media mirror reality, what factors influence their particular view, and what are the consequences of that shaping?

The difficulty of the paradigm, of course, is that it lifts media policy out of a mere bureaucratic administration into a broader dimension of cultural debate: what sort of symbolic environment do we have, what sort of symbolic environment do we want, and what is the role of the media in our collective effort to deal with our human potential for violence?

For this reason, policy-making in relation to our shared symbolic environment is much more complex than policy-making in relation to the natural environment. Our inherited natural environment contains its own norms. While there will be ongoing debate about which natural processes are essential and desirable, which species need to be saved from extinction, and where do we draw the line between environmental preservation and economic development, at least we have a pre-existing natural world and natural processes as a departure point for discussion.

Our symbolic environment, on the other hand, is largely socially constructed. In a pluralistic society such as ours, therefore, finding a common consensus of desirable qualities necessary in human society as a beginning point for discussion about the role the media play in contributing to, or detracting from such shared qualities, is awfully elusive.

If we do not seek such a social basis for policy-making, however, we run the risk of subordinating the needs of people in society to the demands of the economic market place, and of restricting implementation of the aspirations of people to the limitations of the arbitrary scientific instruments we have invented to attempt to measure them.

If we reconceive the problem in such a symbolic environmental way, it opens a number of research possibilities.

What sort of symbolic environment do we have?

How do people respond to the environment?

What sort of society do people want?

What role do the media play in the maintenance and development of our shared symbolic environment?

In what ways do the ownership and institutional factors of the media shape their social functioning?

What particular meaning do the various media place on portrayals of violence (tragedy vs entertainment)? What are the factors influencing this interpretation, and to what extent should those factors be affirmed, counteracted or disciplined?

How much do they focus on violence and what are the factors involved in this focus?

What mechanisms are necessary to maintain dialogue between the economic and institutional dynamics of media industries and their social role?

What mechanisms exist and are necessary to maintain dialogue between the media as institutions and the social aspirations and communication needs of the community?

Following the address of Tribunal Chairman Deirdre O'Connor to the Australian Institute of Criminology's Conference on Violence held in Canberra in October 1989, the three commercial networks advised the Tribunal they were ready to produce an industry code to control television violence.(2) Prior to that conference, I attended one of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal hearings into Media and Violence in Melbourne in mid-1989. Scattered among the audience of the surprisingly well-attended hearing were representatives from the three television networks.

It struck me as unfortunate that it took an expensive series of hearings following a number of unfortunate social traumas for such combined action to take place. The media industry produce programs under significant pressures: from their raison d'etre as commercial institutions, the interweaving nature of media organisation and functioning, their traditions of production, international networking, and social alternatives. This needs to be recognised. Yet, more than most other commercial and social institutions, because of the centrality of communication to the maintenance and functionning of a society, the media have a vital social role to play. While recognising the reality of these other pressures, that vital social role cannot be ignored nor left unattended.

NOTES

(1) Robert A. White and John Sheehan, "A new approach to research on media violence," Communication Research Trends, Vol 5 (1984), No 4, p.8.

(2) "Tribunal offered industry-wide TV violence code," Abtee, 23/10/89, p.3.

Teaching Theology in a New Cultural Environment

Characteristics of the culture in which the gospel is expressed have long been recognized as an essential component in the theological task. Theologian Paul Tillich, for example, suggests that theological thought continually moves in a dialectical tension between two poles - "the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received"(1) (although even this statement of the situation hides the reality that even the "eternal truth" of our theological foundations is culturally embodied).

What has not always been recognized, however, is that "culture" is not a universal, homogeneous phenomenon. In the past few decades liberation, feminist and Asian theologies have been instrumental in reaffirming the reality that culture is specific to particular groups or regions. They have also raised awareness of the extent to which most theological thought in this century has been filtered through a very specific cultural perspective, namely that of Western male academic theologians.

While these particular theologies have been successful in explicating other cultural perspectives not addressed by Western theology, there is one important cultural perspective that is still largely ignored in theological thought and theological education, and that is the cultural context being created by national and international mass media.

The mass media both nationally and internationally are rapidly becoming not just an aspect of social cultures, but through their increasing ubiquity across cultures, their functional interrelationship, and their place within the international market and economic system, are becoming the vanguard of a new international culture whose web is touching and influencing almost every other cultural system. The mass media are forming a new symbolic environment within which societies organize and express themselves.

Australia provides us with an example of this. The environment in which most of the population today are living and thinking has changed its character in the space of little more than one generation. Australians move about their daily life today within an environment that is shaped less by the need to harmonize with the demands, opportunitger necessary.

The dramatic changes which have taken place in the activities and patterns of people's social lives over the past two generations are of major theological significance in themselves. Of further significance, however, are the changes in the overarching symbolic environment within which these activities are taking place and the meanings which this environment imposes on life's events.

The ghetto of theological education

Despite these major implications, the structure, content, functioning and theological ramifications of the mass media remain largely unaddressed in the work of most theological thinkers and theological education institutions. Where they do appear, they tend to be relegated to a minor section of the curriculum, tend to be seen as optional rather than central, and tend to be seen as "soft" rather than "serious" theology. There appear to be a number of reasons for this.

Many, if not most theologians and theological educators still see the mass media basically as tools for sharing ideas and content. The different media are seen as individual and separate functions, with little connectedness or commonality. Because most theologians’ own training and preoccupation has focussed on the rational discrimination of ideas, the concept of the mass media as integrated power and meaning-generating systems which are actively creating a mythological and heuristic milieu to serve particular social and economic interests is foreign to most theological educators.

To a large extent the popular media are ignored in theological education because of the dominant media habits and cultural orientations of theological teachers. Most theological teachers, as with most academics, tend to see print as a superior medium for organizing and communicating ideas. Books and journals therefore are stock in trade in theological education and comprise almost the entire collection of most theological libraries. While theological teachers may use electronic media such as television, videos or radio for "elevated" purposes such as news, documentaries, current affairs, "good" music, or relaxation, "popular" programming is generally unpopular. While it may have some value in relaxation and entertainment, as a source of theological truth most theological educators would see the popular media as lacking in depth and a waste of time.

The culture addressed and referred to in most theological education, therefore, has tended to be an elite culture, one which is considered by most theologians as more appropriate for the elevated task of theological thought and reflection. The problem is that while such culture may give elevated and cultured expression to theological truth, "elite" culture does not adequately express or touch the lived situation of the majority of people. If that remains the dominant cultural form within which ministers are trained, then the foundations laid in theological education will be increasingly inadequate for understanding theologically a large part of the world in which ministry will actually be exercised.

Complicating this whole process is the traditional discipline structure of much theological education and the inability of that structure to handle the multiplication of information and expansion of ideas characteristic of modern society. Most curricula are already stretched to breaking point by the attempt to include in some way the increasing number of different issues ministers are expected to deal with. Given theological teachers own perceptions of media, the addition of a further requirement such as media studies is seen as of low priority compared to what is seen as the more foundational disciplines of biblical studies, church history, and systematic theology and the rapid increase in information to be communicated in those areas.

Seeing the mass media as shaping a new and distinctive cultural environment rather than simply as tools of communication may require a significant conceptual leap for many theological thinkers and educators. When one makes that leap, however, a number of profound implications for the task of theological education and ministerial formation may be identified.

Theological implications of the media reality

Marshall McLuhan many years ago drew attention to the idea that the form as well as the content of a communication carries meaning. Jacques Ellul in his many writings is one theorist who takes seriously the idea that there is ideology inherent in technology with the consequence that the adoption of particular technologies has implications for social and religious meaning and expression. Consistent with this strand of thought is the insight that how the mass media function within a society has a strong shaping effect on how a society understands itself. This occurs in two ways.

On the one hand, the media shape social understanding and expression by virtue of their nature and organization. Mass communications in themselves are strongly ideological: their messages are highly centralized, largely impersonal, machine mediated, lacking opportunity for user feedback and participation, and restricted by their technological characteristics. This is compounded by the nature of their economic and social function.

This ideology which is present in mass media by virtue of their nature and social organization then shapes how they represent social reality through processes of selection and reinterpretation. Studies of mass media indicate that a distinctive and consistent picture of social reality can be identified across the content of various mass media within a culture. These media "myths", which are a function of the factors mentioned above, can be seen most distinctively in television but are common in different ways across most media. While they are rarely explicitly stated, they emerge in dramatic or narrative form in almost all forms of fictional and non-fiction programming: news, sports, drama, situation comedies, advertisements, soap operas, and children's cartoons.

Extensive studies of the content of American television, for example, have found that television programming repetitively presents a particular and consistent dramatic view of the world and life: what is good and what is bad, what has reality and what does not have reality, what power is and who holds power, how relationships should be conducted, and how one should behave in particular situations. These "myths" generally serve the ends of those who exercise power within the media or society, not the needs of the broader strata of society.

The important implication of this is that television in particular and the mass media in general (particularly the commercial media) are presenting a consistent and integrated system of belief and social interpretation as a pattern for social understanding and development. This system of belief and social interpretation generally does not reflect the diversity of social reality there is within the society, but is consistent more with the economic or ideological system which has given it birth and its corporate managers who hold power within the system and benefit from it.

These constantly repeated messages have been shown to be effective agents of social change: not so much by producing direct change in individual behaviour, but by slowly affecting perceptions of social reality and meaning which underlie behaviour. Research shows that the more one watches television, for example, the more one will tend to see and interpret events and situations according to the television picture of life. This change in one's perception of life then changes how one subsequently responds and behaves in particular situations.(2)

The content of these pictures of reality arising from media culture need to be taken more seriously as the stuff of theological work, reflection and education and in the work of proclamation and evangelization.

In this regard, it is interesting to note the extent to which the media context is beginning to be taken seriously by other professional and educational organizations. In medical care, for example, it is being found that prescribed treatment given by a doctor is often not acted upon by patients because the doctor's diagnosis conflicts with the patient's self-diagnosis which is frequently influenced by media sources including talk shows and even soap-operas. In at least one medical school in Australia, prospective doctors are being taught to take seriously the role media might be playing in shaping their patients' self-diagnosis and how this might affect the patient's receptiveness to medical treatment.(3)

A prominent hospital in Australia has also found it necessary to run its own media campaign addressed to doctors to counter the over-prescription of drugs by high-powered media promotional campaigns of pharmaceutical companies.(4)

Theological education needs to take more seriously than it has that the mass media may be having a marked effect on religious faith, not just by the media's presentation of religious issues, but by the influence the media are exerting on perceptions of social reality within which religious faith is understood and experienced.

Hermeneutical implications of the media environment

The development of a media environment holds implications for the contextualization of Christian thought. In his book The Secular City, theologian Harvey Cox in 1965 presented a significant challenge to Western theological thought by highlighting the difference which existed between the natural agricultural environment in which biblical thought had developed and the urban social environment of modern life. Cox pointed to the significant work of hermeneutics which needed to take place in order to translate the gospel message from the biblical rural environment to an urban one. The emergence in recent years of a new media environment which overarches the urban-technological one takes that hermeneutical challenge a step further.

Much of biblical thought, Christian theology, apologetics, preaching and church practice is based on an assumed environment of the world of nature. Biblical writers were continually making inference from the environment of nature to nature's God. Much of traditional and contemporary Christian proclamation, apologetics and worship assumes an innate "suspicion" within people that for the world to be the way it is there must be a greater power behind it - note, for example, Paul's statement to the Romans: "There is no excuse at all for not honouring God, for God's invisible qualities are made visible in the things God has made".

The modern environment of the mass media, however, presents a quite different world. It is not a world we have inherited as a gift: it is a world that we ourselves have manufactured and largely control. It is not a world in which the invisible qualities of God are made visible: it is a world of wall-to-wall technological processes in which God is significantly absent and apparently not necessary. It is a world in which the subconscious "suspicion" of God's existence and presence, on which so much of our Christian apologetics and proclamation have depended, may be disappearing. Bishop Bruce Wilson summarised the situation in the following way:

"Everyday life ceases to appear as something manipulated by vast, mysterious forces beyond human control or understanding and becomes a world that is manipulable, predictable, and intelligible....When you can get by happily enough without God, even if you do believe in him, why bother with him at all?"(5)

Preparation for ministry in a mediated consumer society

A further implication for theological education arises from the close link that the international mass media have with western consumer philosophy. The underlying assumptions of consumerism have significant religious overtones: that satisfying one's needs and wants is the desired goal of life; that each individual has a right to have their needs met regardless of the cost to others; and that most needs can be met by acquiring a product or service. Western commercial media are the vanguard in the promotion of this philosophy.

Against such a background, the Christian message of the ultimate supremacy of God, the importance of personal discipline, the postponement of gratification for sacrifice and service, and the limiting of one's own wants and demands for moral reasons can sound jarring, unrealistic, and fraudulent. One Australian prime minister ten years ago received strong criticism and contributed to loss of an election by saying on television: "Life wasn't meant to be easy!" No politician since has repeated the mistake!

What needs to be explored is the effect this constant conditioning in consumerism is doing to the common understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be religious, and what it means to have faith. At its simplest level, as Colin Morris notes in God in a Box: Christian Strategy in a Television Age, the church in western societies now finds itself in a totally competitive communication marketplace, vying with the mass media to capture people's attention, time and energy with an answer to their needs. This competitiveness is not restricted solely to the West. A Sri Lankan pastor told me that the time of a church service in his area had to be changed recently because of a conflict with the broadcast of the American television drama, Dallas.

At a deeper level, as people are conditioned to a consumer outlook, the church finds itself under challenge to present the Christian faith in a way that meshes with people's desire for answers, and in a more pernicious way for a faith "product", that will meet their needs with a minimum of effort and disruption. Virginia Stem Owens has suggested provocatively in her book The Total Image that Jesus increasingly is being commended, not through proclamation, but through marketing in a subtle way that favourably blends the Christian message with identifiable consumer life-styles.

The ways in which churches are responding to this situation reflect the full spectrum of options suggested by H.Richard Niebuhr in Christ and Culture. What is lacking, however, is a clear and articulated theological perspective to justify the different positions or by which to critique them.

The Church Growth Movement, for example, has responded by adaptation, utilising the technologies of marketing analysis, business administration and mass communication to help churches grow. A principal strategy of the church growth philosophy has been to identify the major demands people are making and tailoring the message and methods of the church to meet those demands, right down to the type of minister needed, the types of programs that should be offered, the type of theology to preach, the best places to build, and the most productive market segment to target with one’s "packaged" message.

Another example of this approach is the American evangelical broadcasters. The grandeur of their productions, the images of "success," their "positive thinking" messages, and their offering of gifts and goods in return for donations translates the Christian message into an attractive consumer package that reflects a cultural form similar to that of media consumerism.

A range of questions are raised by this phenomenon. Have such churches grasped the new nature of social reality as it has been created in our subconscious by television and the other mass media? What are the theological implications of a change away from the biblical position where God is seen as supreme to the position where people's religious needs are seen as supreme? What are the implications for ministry in an environment where faith is transmuted away from an emphasis on the service of God to one of selection of aspects of faith and churches according to what one perceives one's needs are? Is there a valid integration of the consumer philosophy with the Christian revelation? In what ways must Christian faith accommodate consumerism, and in what ways must it challenge it? Should Christian faith be communicated in consumer terms in order to address people where they are, but nurture them towards the service of God when they are converted from consumerism?

What is the gospel?

Awareness that there are particular cultural situations rather than a universal culture within which the gospel takes form raises, of course, the obvious question: what is the gospel? This is not a new debate. Within Christianity it is as old as Paul's argument against circumcision. It has been raised again more recently in the face of the cultural challenges to dominant western theological formulations by liberation, feminist and Asian theologians.

A dimension which has been missed in this ongoing debate, however, is the extent to which the medium through which the gospel is mediated adds a cultural dimension which also needs to be considered in discerning the nature of the gospel. Dimensions of this issue have already been raised by different thinkers. Marshall McLuhan did initial explorations in this in his proposals on the medium of communication shapes the message and how the dominant media of a society structure how individuals and the society perceive and conceive truth and reality.(6) Jesuit thinker Walter Ong has identified different ways in which religion is given form because of differences in the media dominant in the society. Jacques Ellul has written extensively on the nature of truth in relation to different media forms.(7)

A number of major issues for theological education can be seen to arise from this debate. A useful starting point for theological educators is a personal one: in what ways do one's own sub-cultural media preferences shape and proscribe one's perception and teaching of the faith?

If one grasps the significance of that question, a number of related ones begin to emerge: What then is the gospel? By what principles can one evaluate the truth of different expressions of the gospel in different media without confusing differences of truth with differences of taste and without lapsing into an indiscriminate media form relativism on the one hand or an exclusive media form chauvinism on the other? By what principles does one provide a critique of the various media cultures from a standpoint of the gospel when one's understanding of the gospel has itself been mediated through a specific media culture? How does one translate truths of the gospel gained from print sources in theological education to people whose understanding of truth is dominated by oral or audio-visual communication?

A deliberate theological study of the mass media can also give new insights and perspectives to the ongoing theological debate about the contextualization of theology. A simple example may be helpful. There has been ongoing discussion in Australia, as there has in many countries, into identifying characteristics of Australian culture which may serve as a basis for developing a genuinely "Australian" theology. Many of the characteristics which have emerged in this ongoing discussion, however, have not reflected the actual social realities within Australian society, but have reflected more some of the media myths about what Australians are really like. The same may apply in other countries: when one seeks to develop theological forms which arise out of "people's" culture, what sources are being used to identify people's culture and what is the role of the interpretive power of the media in shaping those sources?

Social dimensions of international ownership

The structure and functioning of the international media are a major issue of social justice. Most international media systems and news services are western owned and controlled. News gathering is to a dominant extent centered in the hands of four First World agencies and two major television news agencies. Control of international communication cables and satellites, development of technology, and access to information is firmly in First World hands.(8)

The flow of news, therefore, is grossly imbalanced in favour of the West. Even when news does flow from Third World countries it is generally through the eyes of Western journalists. These patterns of control frequently make it easier for countries in the Third World to receive news about what is happening in the West than it is to receive news about what is happening in a neighbouring country.

The export of cultural products, such as television programs, is a major item of world trade. Most U.S. programs are paid for before leaving the U.S. The price at which such programs are made available to other countries is generally adjusted according to a nation's capacity to pay, making them much cheaper than local programming and therefore almost irresistible to local broadcasters. In 1980-81, for example, one major Australian broadcaster spent $61.4 million for Australian programs which comprised 35.6% of program time, and only $12.7 million for the remaining 64.4% made up of imported programs.(9)

Other issues relate to national control of the means of social communication. Ownership of Australian media, for example, after being bounced around like a football for the past five years, has become amongst the most concentrated in the world. Television in Australia has become dominated by three corporations, each of which has access to around 60% of the country's population. Rupert Murdoch, who is no longer an Australian citizen, now controls seventy percent of the total circulation of Australian newspapers and has reduced competition significantly by purchasing major competing newspapers and closing or amalgamating them.(10)

Of further interest is the direct effect international media concentration and control may have on the development and extension of religious thought. What will be the effects, for example, of the large number of amalgamations and the growing commercialisation of religious publishing in the U.S.A. and Britain? Will serious religious thought be displaced by coffee table theology?

The mass media as a functional religion

Over the past few decades, occasional articles or books have appeared analysing ways in which people's use of mass media takes on religious characteristics.(11) These analyses, by utilising a functional definition of religion,(12) indicate different ways in which the mass media are serving a highly ritualised, integrative, value-forming, and community-cohering function similar to that which has traditionally been served by the established and recognized religious faiths.

Partly under the impact of constant conditioning in consumerism, people in western democratic societies increasingly are putting together their own religious belief and life-style packages in order to meet individual needs. The mass media through their content and in the way they are used are playing a significant religious role in this process. This is not to say that the mass media would see themselves in such religious terms, nor that people would acknowledge that they see their use of mass media as parallel to participation in a religious faith. But in practical terms the mass media for many people are playing a major role in meeting their needs for integrative ritual, self-transcendence, social integration and shared belief.

If one can recognise the vital role which the mass media are playing in this regard and understand some of its major mythologies, exploration of the process and media mythologies offers a rich resource for theological reflection and the cultural contextualization of faith.

The appropriate use of different media

Greater emphasis tends to be given in theological education to the analysis and formation of ideas rather than their communication. This factor, along with the largely unquestioned preference for print and the spoken word, has meant that inadequate attention is generally given to other factors which play a vital role in formation and communication of faith, factors such as the way in which the medium used may influence the substance of the message, the potential which exists in media other than print or voice for communicating the gospel, and the principles which might guide ministers in the most appropriate selection and integration of the different media.

Other media, such as the visual arts, music, drama, dance and audio-visual modes of communication are noticeably absent in theological education. Not only does this absence miss a rich potential, it inculcates in potential ministers a patties and rhythms of the natural world, and more by the rhythms, images and constructions of a mediated consumer economy and its associated mass communication systems.

Australians today, particularly those living in urban or suburban contexts, spend almost the whole of their life in the context of mass mediated messages. They encounter a constant barrage of visual messages on books and cereal boxes, bumper stickers, posters, billboards, newspapers and magazines. They are enveloped in a panoply of constant constructed sound through radio talk and music in the kitchen, by the bedside, in the car, and even while we ride in the tram or on their bicycles. The recreation of Australians is permeated by a highly stylized mythology of contest through such things as mediated news, sports and drama, videos, fun parlours, and computer games. Australian urban and suburban society has become an environment shaped by the scientific and technological method in which God is not only apparently absent but is functionally no lonern of communication which is carried into practical ministry.

There is a need in theological education therefore to address also the practical and theological questions of media utilization, questions such as: What is the appropriate relationship between inter-personal, group and mass media in communicating the gospel? What aspects of faith may be communicated by mass means, and what should be communicated inter-personally? What principles should guide one in selecting the different media? What are the practical guidelines governing which media to use, when to use them and how to use them?

NOTES

(1) Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. 3 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63, p. I:3.

(2) For further elaboration of this concept, see particularly the extensive work of George Gerbner and his associates at the Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia.

(3) The Newcastle University School of Medicine.

(4) Gib Wettenhall, "A dose of their own medicine," Australian Society, May 1987, pp.25-26.

(5) Bruce Wilson, Can God Survive in Australia? Sutherland, Albatross, 1983, pp.34,41.

(6) see Understanding Media, Signet, 1964.

(7) see Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, Eerdmans, 1985; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word, Methuen, 1982.

(8) Bill Bonney and Helen Wilson, Australia's Commercial Media, South Melbourne: MacMillan, 1983, pp.48-50.

(9) Ibid, p.89.

(10) Paul Chadwick, Media Mates: Carving up Australia's Media, South Melbourne, Macmillan, 1989.

(11) see for example, William Kuhns, The Electronic Gospel, New York: Herder and Herder, 1969; George Gerbner with Kathleen Connoly, "Television as New Religion," New Catholic World, April/May 1978: 52-56; Gregor Goethals, The TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar, Boston: Beacon Press, 1981; Peter Horsfield, "Larger Than Life: Religious Functions of Television." Media Information Australia, 47 (Feb 1988): 61-66.

(12) see for example that proposed by Milton Yinger in The Scientific Study of Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Larger Than Life: Religious Functions of Television

Redefining the religious

Traditionally the scientific study of religion had been limited to those aspects of life and culture explicitly linked with belief in a supernatural being or forces. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, proposed that the study of religion is concerned with "the traditional acts and observances, regarded by the natives as sacred, carried out with reverence and awe, hedged around with prohibitions and special rules and behaviour. Such acts and observances are always associated with beliefs in supernatural forces." [1948, 17]

In recent years, however, there have been substantial changes within the scientific study of religion to include non-theistic systems of belief and ritual within its scope. The "functional" approach to the scientific study of religion, for example, identifies a particular behaviour as "religious" not necessarily by its supernatural referent, but rather by the distinctively "religious" functions being served by that behaviour.

Underlying this approach is the assumption that human beings are inescapably religious in the sense that we continually find ourselves in situations where decisions and actions involve unprovable "faith" assumptions. Because a person's philosophy does not include a supernatural element does not mean they cease to be religious in a functional sense. The question is not whether one is religious or not: it is in what ways is one religious and on what assumptions are one's religious ideas and behaviour based.

The problem in such an approach, of course, is how to define clearly the nature of the religious. Many different attempts have been made to effect such a redefinition from a functional perspective. The approach followed here is that of the philosopher David Tracy. Tracy identifies as religious those ideas and behaviour which reflect what he calls a "limit" quality: religious behaviour is that by which humans seek to adapt to, cope with, or understand dimensions of life beyond their explanation, prediction or control.[1975, 99FF] It is when we find ourselves in situations in which we must go beyond our human ability to explain sensorily, to predict, or to control the situation that our religious beliefs and behaviour come to be manifested.

Sociologist Milton Yinger suggests that in the absence of the generally readily identifiable super-natural referent, the most effective way to identify the operative religious faiths in society is through their ritualistic expressions. In his The Scientific Study of Religion, [1970, 17] he says, "I am inclined to say, Look for rituals first, then for the beliefs connected with them; there you will find the operating religion of an individual or group."

Some initial work has been done on teasing out elements of Australian folk religion. In this paper I suggest that television needs to be considered seriously as an operative religious activity for a large proportion of the Australian population. That does not mean that the television industry would see itself in religious terms nor that people, if questionned, would say they use television as a religious substitute. But when one applies criteria of critical analysis, the correspondence between the content and uses of television and traditional religious practices is significant.

This proposition is examined in terms of the three universal expressions or functions of religious faith, whether theistic or non-theistic: the practical, or the system of worship or ritual; the sociological, or the system of social relationships; and the theoretical, or the system of beliefs.

The practical expression: ritual and worship

There are many rituals associated with the use of mass media, but the ritualistic nature of television in modern society is perhaps the most readily identifiable. The loyalty which television has been able to elicit from its adherents is more pervasive than perhaps any other single social phenomenon in human history.

Television now consumes more time and attention of more people than all other media and leisure activities combined. In the process it has displaced in a significant way time once spent on other apparently important human activities such as social gatherings away from home, interpersonal interactions, and active participation in leisure activities.

Traditionally, the rituals of religion were identified as serving the major function of transcending present profane time. The ritual act withdraws us from the ordinary world of mortality and limitation into a special space, time and action in which the mundane and finite is transformed into something of eternal quality.

There are several characteristics which identify television as a substitute ritual for overcoming the profanity of everyday life.

Studies show that the major uses of television by the public are for entertainment, escape, and the filling of vacant time. Television in this regard blends complementarily with the present economic structures and sociological dynamics of Western technological and industrial society. Television has found a significant role in anaesthetizing the unresolved frustrations and fatigue arising out of the disjunctive life-style of much of the late 20th century Western society.

One of the main attributes of television is its repetitiveness, a significant parallel to liturgical practices which intuitively developed a similar aspect. The repetitive, ritualistic patterns of viewing provide a structure to life which may be considered as fulfilling a similar function to cultic/religious affirmations of a theistic divine order. Whether it be the inculcated desire to keep up with the progress of particular soap operas or sporting events, or the guilt felt when missing the evening news or serious documentaries, the effect is similar. Television has come to order our lives in such a way that it becomes gratifying to live in harmony with the order imposed by this thing beyond.

We have become so inundated and saturated with news and information that the content of what we see or hear makes little difference. It is the ritual of hearing and seeing that has become satisfying. As Thoreau noted:

I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burnt, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for .. ....myriad instances and applications?

I would suggest that this social ritualism of television and its social implications will never be fully understood until its religious characteristics also are examined.

Channel 0 in Brisbane provides an illustration of this structural function of television. In a recent promotional spot, it showed a variety of people in boring, everyday situations -- an office worker at her desk, a woman walking along the street, an old woman struggling with parcels. Their lives were suddenly sparked by an encounter with the Channel 0 news team: the woman in the office receiving a beatific vision of the Channel 0 helicopter outside her office window; the one on the street seeing the News team at work; and the old woman being given help with her parcels by the Channel 0 news anchor. The ritual is extended! The promo ends with a woman returning safe again to the womb of her home, turning on to Channel 0, settling back, and hearing the words of a hymn (sorry, song) "Channel 0, you are the biggest part of me."

One does not need to watch for long to note the similarity of formats used and the development of identifiable sub-rituals: news, current affairs, sports, soap operas, situation comedies, drama, and the mini series.

What characterises all of these genres is the absence of demand. Demand and work are characteristics of the profane. Television transcends the profane by providing a media ritual which is at the same time engaging yet free of effort.

The sociological expression: relating meaningfully to the environment

Another traditional function of religion is that of providing a system of meaningful social interaction, particularly in the field of defining taboos and reinforcing those mores without which social organisation would disintegrate.

In today's society there are two major threats to social maintenance: the abrasions of intensified social living and the frustrations of unrealised expectations.

Last century Marx criticised religion as being the opiate of the masses because it suppressed radical challenge to the system. Because it provided a supernatural rationale for the system as it was, and moral constraints by which dissatisfaction with the system could be managed, Marx claimed that religion suppressed genuine social change.

Today television may be challenged as being the opiate of the 20th century fatigued person. (This suggestion is not new. In the 1950's, Paul Lazarsfeld suggested that one of the major social effects of the mass media is what he called their narcotising dysfunction effect.)

Supernatural or theistic religion generally used a supernatural imprimatur for justifying the existing mores despite their discrepancies. Television has, as a secular tool, largely rejected the concept of God, but in the place of God television substitutes the larger economic order, and like the Christian religion has created its own "super-natural" agents or saints to help maintain and represent this order.

Television has a key stake in maintaining the present social system. Its owners are people who are successful within the system, who are key power brokers in the system, and whose livelihood is dependent on the system continuing as it is.

The main tools of television were not the characteristic religious ones of mystery, revelation and tradition, but fantasy and humour. Television presents and interprets factual and fictional stories in such a way that challenges to the integrity of the status quo are effectively managed.

An important element of this process is the supernatural hero. Like the saints of Christendom, television's heroes are identifiable and continuing characters who, while participating in our human situation, also successfully overcome its abrasions, anxieties and threats, thus reinforcing the integrity of the system. There are two identifiable expressions of the super-natural television hero: the dramatic and the comedic.

The dramatic hero is one for whom the tensions, dreads and abrasions of life do not exist. The message is: How can we dare to questions the established order when there are some who obviously are unaffected by it! Two forms of the dramatic hero can be identified.

The first is the news anchorperson. It is easy to underestimate the significant symbolic function which the news anchorperson fulfils in our present society. Not only is he or she the means by which we receive news of breakdowns in our social organisation; he or she is also the guarantor of the system despite these breakdowns. Like a calm school principal handling a minor disturbance, the news anchor has it all under control. As the world seems to be falling apart, as crisis piles upon crisis, the anchorperson is totally unmoved by it. As the news has threatened to untie the system, the anchorperson is the one who at the ends ties it all back together again. Walter Cronkite, long-time anchor for CBS News in the U.S., used to finish each news program with the words, "And that's the way it is: Thursday, 3rd May, 1976. Goodnight!"

The second form of dramatic hero is the crime, drama, or sports hero. He or she is the person, very often a continuing character with whom we are encouraged to establish a vicarious relationship, who faces and overcomes threat or challenge and emerges, often bloodied, but always victorious. Whether it be Clint Eastwood in any of his many roles, Jennifer Carson on Carson's Law, the team on The Professionals, or Michael Kusak on L.A. Law, the essence of the role is that they are people who, like the Christian saints, struggle with the kinks in the system and resist the outward or inward threats to the economic faith and emerge triumphant epitomes of power, integrity and self-control. If they can do it, the message goes, so can you!

Television is adept at handling minority challenges in this way. When a deprived group raises its voice in objection, television responds by creating a suitable hero: a Mexican-American lawyer on L.A. Law, a female professional, a television evangelist. The message is the same yet again: how can you question the system when there are obviously people like you who succeed in it! Such a device is certainly an effective way of managing social change. In the process, however, the essence of the minority criticism tends to be reduced and deflated so that structural change to the system needs no further consideration.

For those who are unable to measure up to the stringent example of the dramatic hero, television embodies its own style of forgiveness and reconciliation in the form of the comedic hero. The hero of comedy, in contrast to the dramatic hero, is the one who fails and becomes entangled or submerged in the pitfalls of the taboo, but who also demonstrates the socially acceptable way of being restored to "divine" respectability. Whether it is in the area of family problems, as in Cosby or Mother and Son, race relations and childhood preciousness as in Different Strokes, or chauvinistic ockerism as in Kingswood Country, the comedic hero reassures us of the presence of a divine guarantor by embodying our fears and facilitating their catharsis.

The similarities between all supernatural heroes of television lie in the narrowing of their personalities in line with the efficient fulfilling of the required task and their general reaffirmation of the status quo. Their answer to the abrasions of modern life is thus, again, to be found in unquestionning adaptation to the established order, not in change.

The philosophic expression: a basis for common belief

The third of the major functions of traditional religious faith is to provide a body of belief structures which serve to harmonise the many disparate ideas, experiences and institutions within society in such a way that individual as well as corporate needs and aspirations are given expression. Today, that function is performed for many by television -- through shared ritual, stereotypes and consistent mythologies.

There is perhaps no social institution better equipped to provide a basis for common belief than television. It is more ubiquitous, more centrally administered, more attractive and more compelling than any other social medium.

It is also international. One of the best kept secrets and one of the major preoccupations of Western countries in the northern summer of 1980 was not the US presidential elections, but the question relating to the program Dallas: "Who shot JR?" One mid-Atlantic French flight interrupted its passengers to give them the answer as soon as it had been revealed on the program. When MASH broadcast its final episode, parties were held across the US to bring friends of MASH together to mourn its passing. (Personally, I wish I could have been there!)

But television's belief system is different from other religious belief systems. Most religious faiths are based on a revelatory event or on a significant content or meanings, either cognitive or experiential, which serve to organise human experience. Common belief or fellowship communities often become organised around these shared meanings.

In television, the faith assumption that underlies television's message that we are urged to accept and respond to is that the sponsoring system is able to meet all human need. This economic order is fundamental.

Withon this overarching belief structure, the emphasis is not on normative content or meaning, but on accumulating people to sell to advertisers. The content of television is totally subservient to this purpose. Television's philosophy is reductionist. The common denominator, out of which it builds a philosophy and which most coincides with the requirements of its financiers, is human enjoyment. Its basic mode is entertainment, even in presenting such unlikely entertainment as human suffering and tragedy.

That television is effective in creating or extending common belief patterns among viewers is demonstrated by research. Studies show consistently that heavy viewers of television begin to reflect the perceptions and myths which television subtly propogates. Television constantly presents and reinforces the following beliefs:

* Success in life is best measured by one's possessions and power. Less tangible qualities such as depth of character, personal integrity, or quality of relationships find little place.

* The world is an increasingly violent place, and one is justified in protecting oneself by the adoption of violence also.

* Social violence is basically irrational, not a reaction to resolvable social conditions.

* Happiness lies primarily in acquiring goods and services, not in developing personal goals and relationships.

* There is greater worth in being young, male, and white than in being old, female, or coloured.

* Finding easy ways to avoid one's problems is more desirable than resolving them through disciplined and intelligent effort.

* Most of life's pressing problems have simple solutions, and those solutions are generally found in the purchase of a product, the passing of a law, or the application of a technology.

One could easily identify others, or go into more detail in these. The important thing is that television is laying the foundations of a consistent and integrated system of belief which fails to reflect the diversity of social reality but which is consistent with the economic system which has given it birth and serves the needs not primarily of people in society but of its corporate managers.

It is interesting to note, therefore, that an increasing number of advertisers, particularly the multi-national conglomerates, are presenting themselves in terms whose double meanings have religious dimensions of omniscience (all-knowledge) and omnipotence (all-power), such as

Coke: "Coke is it!"

General Electric: "We brings good things to life."

Sanyo: "I said, That's life! Sanyo."

MacDonalds: "We do it all for you."

The more the mass media come to be controlled by large corporate conglomerates which have broad social interests and world-wide organisations, and which all serve the one economic system, the more this will become the case.

The danger is that because meanings and purpose are significant motivators of human activity and creativity, the consequences of television's functionning as a religious phenomenon may not be social motivation but acquiescence in the status quo. Two factors contribute to this.

One is that a significant effect of television's violent content may be not increased aggression, but the magnification of fear and social anxiety. A major effect of television's "religious" functionning may be a greater willingness of people to abnegate their individual social responsibility and acquiescence to totalitarian figures and institutions who appear more able to handle the perceived increasingly chaotic social situation.

A further effect may be that of an increased consumerist attitude: the belief that my needs and my wants have ultimate importance and validity. While such a philosophy may serve well while the attraction and possibility of improving one's lot are viable, as a social philosophy it has few resources for dealing with unavoidable deprivation or frustration, human finitude, sacrifice, or the search for justice.

This religious nature of television content and use is posing a challenge to established religious bodies. People's conditionning in consumerism in subtle ways is changing the theological concept of faith, so that in certain theologies God is seen not so much as the object of service and obedience but as a convenient device by which one's religious needs are met. It is interesting to note in this regard the growth of large churches whose approach is that of offering what amounts to a "comprehensive religious service" to what has become an increasingly discriminating and mobile religious clientele.

As mentioned earlier, I am not suggesting that the mass media would see themselves in such religious terms, nor that the mass media could be conceived as replacing theistic religion. But in the syncretistic way in which people today put together their own religious belief and life-style packages in ways that meet their individual needs, the mass media in their characteristic uses and contents are becoming a significant component of those belief systems. They are meeting needs and fulfilling some of the functions which people once found in theistic religion, and in the process are modifying some traditional expressions of religious faith.

REFERENCES

Malinowski B, Magic, Science and Rel.igion and Other Essays,

Doubleday, Garden City, 1948.

Tracy D, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology,

Seabury, New York, 1975.

Yinger M, The Scientific Study of Religion,

Macmillan, New York, 1970.

Mass Media and Ministry

When one talks about the relationship between mass media and religion in our Australian society today, two topics generally arise. One is the lament about the number of people who no longer come to church because they're too busy watching television or their videos, particularly during the cricket tests or popular drama series on television. The other is the concern people express about the morally damaging effect television, videos and movies are having on people, particularly those that are heavy in sexual or violent content.

These are legitimate concerns, of course. The church is not the only social institution to complain about the difficulty of getting volunteer workers, Nor is the church the only social institution to express concern about the effect of violent or sexually explicit programs, particularly on children.

The greater issue in the relationship between the mass media and religion in Australian society -- as in the whole of Western society -- is a more subtle one. It is one, though, that is having a much more significant impact on the understanding and practise of religious faith because it is laying the foundations for a change that will be durable over a much longer period of time.

In this paper, I want to address some of those issues: first by indicating the trends in the study of mass communication; and second by applying these to three areas of religious faith: hermeneutics and proclamation, church practise, and religious experience. I will finish by suggesting some possible courses of action.

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When one thinks of the effect of the mass media on society, one of the most common thoughts is on whether people imitate what they see. Studies show, however, that the imitation effect is not the best way to conceive the relationship between the mass media and society.

One of the more widely accepted theories of general television effect used in research today is the cultivation analysis theory. This theory, which has been developed, tested, applied and modified over the past fifteen years, suggests that the major effect of television on people and society is not through the direct changes in behaviour it brings about, but through the long-term shaping or cultivation of people's perception of what life is really like.

Through hundreds of detailed studies of the content of television programs, researchers have found that television, through its programming repetitively presents particular and consistent ideas about the world and life:

what is good and what is bad,

what has reality and what does not have reality,

what power is and who holds the power in society,

how relationships should be conducted, and

how one should behave in particular situations.

These "myths" that television uses -- these "pictures of reality" -- are rarely explicitly stated, but they underly almost all forms of programming: news, sports, drama, situation comedies, advertisements, soap operas, and even, or more accurately particularly, children's cartoons.

Let me spell out some of these myths. Television constantly reinforces the message, for example, that:

* success in life is best measured by one's possessions and power

* that the world is an increasingly violent place and one is justified in protecting oneself by violent means

* that happiness lies primarily in acquiring goods and services

* that being young, male and white is of greater importance than being old, female, or coloured

* that avoiding one's problems is more desirable than resolving them through disciplined and intelligent effort.

* that progress and efficiency are always good

* that most of life's pressing problems have simple solutions, and that solution is generally found in the purchase of a product or the application of a new technology

* that God has no place or relevance in today's world.

I am sure you could identify others. The important thing is that this environment in which we find ourselves is shaping the way in which people now think about life and make their decisions, even though they (we) may not be conscious of that influence.

This constantly repeated message of television has been shown to change people's perception of life and its meaning. Research shows that the more one watches television, the more one begins to see and interpret events and situations according to the television picture iof life. This unnoticed change in one's perception changes how one subsequently responds and behaves to life's situations.

Researchers have undertaken numerous studies into these pictures of reality affect people's response to many life issues. But little has been done to measure their effect on how people perceive the relevance and practise of religious faith. But if one extends what has been found in other situations, it is possible that the mass media may be having a marked effect on religious faith by changing the very foundations of social perception and social reality by which religious faith is expressed.

Television may, in effect, have changed the terms under which people will be religious. Let me move on to suggest a couple of ways in which this be considered.

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The first is in the area of hermeneutics and proclamation.

One of the problems in communication is that often we think we are making good sense to someone else, when in fact we are missing something very vital in the background.

Read Psalm 8 and Romans 1:16-23.

In reading these two passages, one is reminded again of how important the context of the world of nature was in the development of biblical theology and in the communication of those truths.

That is not to say that the biblical writers had a purely natural theology, but as you read through the scriptures, you will find that the biblical writers were continually making inference from nature to nature's God. Many of the central doctrines of our faith not only were expressed in natural images, but they gained their authority because they resonated with people's subconscious experience of the world in which they lived.

Our doctrine of creation for example, is tied very closely to the sense of giftedness of the universe in which we live. Our concepts of providence, the mystery of God, human dependence on God, and Divine Immanence, all arise significantly from experiences of the processes, order and dependability of nature. Even our central doctrines of redemption and renewal while not being purely natural theology, gain much of their strength as ideas because they tap into our collective experience of the ability of nature to renew itself. The hope of salvation in Isaiah, for example, is sustained by a common experience of the natural world:

"The royal line of David is like a tree that has been cut down; but just as new branches sprout from a stump, so a new king will arise from among David's descendents."

Much of our Christian proclamation and apologetics draws on this innate "suspicion" people have that for the world to be the way it is, there must be a greater power behind it. So Paul's statement to the Romans,

"There is no excuse at all for not honouring God, for his

invisible qualities are made visible in the things he has made"

carried added authority because it resonated with the world in which they lived.

But for most people living in Australia today, the environment in which we are living has changed its character, and with it is changing also the subconscious "suspicion" that people have of God's presence and activity, a suspicion on which so much of our Christian apologetics and proclamation has depended.

For the world in which most people today spend most of their time is not the world of nature in which the invisible qualities of God are made visible. It is a world of wall-to-wall technological devices, in which God not only is not made visible, but appears to be increasingly irrelevant.

The world in which people in Australia today spend most of their time is not the world of nature, it is a world of human artifact. It is not a world we have inherited as a gift, it is a world we ourselves have manufactured. It is a world of artificial light; of cereal boxes, newspapers, and magazines read at meal tables and on public transport. It is a world of kitchen, car, and walkman radios. It is a world of videos, fun parlours, and computers. It is a world of television, which provides an environment of constant pictures and stories so that you no longer have to think or live your own. It is a world in which increasingly silence is being abolished. It is a world shaped by the scientific method, in which God technically is not necessary.

So people today, particularly those who live in the cities, do not live in a natural environment in which God is a gracious partner. They live in an environment in which just about everything we use and count on has been made or improved by human beings. I was interested to hear of a recent study on nutrition conducted in the western suburbs of Sydney, which found that there were teenagers who had never eaten a piece of fresh fruit. Their total diet had consisted of processed food.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that the real focus of attention and devotion through its public voice is on those forces that shape this new environment: international and local politics and economics, and entertainment.

It is an interesting exercise to calculate how much of your average day is spent absorbing mass-mediated messages, from such things as radio and records, television, newspapers and journals, cereal boxes, street signs and stop lights, books, bumper stickers, billboards and banknotes. You may be surprised to discover that almost the whole of our waking life is spent in some way in the presence of mass-mediated messages, messages which, by their nature, are highly ideological by virtue of their being centralised, largely impersonal, lacking the opportunity for personal feedback and participation, and generally existing primarily for the purpose of economic profit.

Figures on television viewing alone show that the average child today, by the time they graduate from high school, would have spent more time in front of the television set than they would in the classroom. In fact, by the time they leave high school, the average child would have spent four and a half years of his or her time awake doing nothing but watching television.

Of course we deal with the mass of information we receive selectively, but the important factor is not what individual messages we become aware of, but the total message we absorb from the whole environment. People today are living in a new, artificially structured environment.

This is a change from earlier years, when the mass media were less integrated and functionned primarily as tools of communication for society's use. Today, however, they represent such a powerful force which is so entrenched and so economically competitive that they present themselves increasingly as indispensible, trustworthy, and omni-competent means of social life and experience.

For example, it is interesting to note how many major products and producers now present themselves in religious or philosophical terms.

>>>>"All good gifts around us are sent from from heaven above?" we used to sing. No longer. All good gifts around us are found at MacDonalds, who do it ALL for you.

>>>>GOD the Creator of life? No longer. Now it's General Electric, who bring good things to life.

>>>>God was revealed to Moses as the indefinable I AM. Today Coke promotes itself with that status, with its slogan "COKE IS IT!"

>>>>Sanyo promotes itself as all-encompassing by saying, "I said That's Life! Sanyo!"

>>>>What does the message "God loves you" mean when dozens of times daily a television station told its Brisbane listeners in an uplifting, inspirational way, "Love you, Brisbane!"

>>>>I'm not sure if you had the same ad on television down here, but one of the most inspirational visions I have seen recently was a beer ad, which with sweeping scenes of nature and uplifting music, sang the song,

You can feel it in the sunrise of an early Autumn dawn;

You can feel it in the earth beneath your feet.

You can taste it in the rain of a sudden summer storm,

You can see it as the sunset calls retreat.

I can feel a Fourex coming on.

On one hand we can push such things aside and say, "Advertisers have always been like that." But on the other hand, these things are just one part of what has become an all-encompassing world view that is well-integrated, consistent, deliberate, and influential, and it is steadily convincing millions of people to look at life in the same way. That world view has important implications for our Christian apologetics and proclamation.

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The second major implication arises from the close link that the mass media have with consumer philosophy: the message that the immediate needs and wants of the consumer are supreme.

Against such a background, the Christian message of the ultimate supremacy of God, the importance of personal discipline, the postponement of gratification through sacrifice and service, and the limiting of one's demands for moral reasons sounds jarring, unreal, and irrelevant.

I would suggest that this conditioning in consumerism is changing the common understanding of what it means to have faith. I think this is evidenced by the marked increase in the past decade in the practise of "church-shopping."

This trend in ecclesiastical mobility has led to a greater emphasis on a church's "image," an essential element in attracting and retaining the circulating saints. In many quarters one can see a distinct movement away from smaller neighbourhood churches to larger churches which can offer a "comprehensive religious service" to its now discriminating and mobile religious clientele.

The Church Growth Movement has picked up on this consumer emphasis in society, and by the application of marketing analysis and technology can help churches grow by identifying the major demands people are making and tailoring your church to meet those demands: right down to the type of minister needed, the types of programs that should be offered, the type of theology to preach, the best places to build, and the most productive market segment to aim for.

I consider it is not accidental that the churches which have shown most marked growth in this decade have been those whose message parallels the television image.

Those churches, for example

* which are strongly authoritarian

* which see most issues in black and white terms

* where the Christian faith is presented with a strong emphasis on personal and immediate gratification

* where the Christian message is presented in a lifestyle package that emphasises success, health, and prosperity

* where there is a strong emphasis on God's power to achieve dramatic things, and which major on the sensational

* where there is constant noise, with little time for silence.

The most obvious example of this are the American evangelical broadcasters. The grandeur of their productions, the images of "success," their "positive thinking" messages, and their offering of gifts and goods in return for donations translates the Christian message into an attractive consumer package.

The large super-churches which have appeared in most Australian capital and provincial cities in the past decade also reflect a similar culture: apparently successful; spectacular worship services; charismatic leaders; the use of stereotypes; centralised decision-making; and messages which stress the benefits of believing.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that the Church Growth movement can teach us some important lessons and give some valuable insights into the practise of ministry.

It may be also that such churches have grasped the new nature of reality as it has been created in our subconscious by television and the other mass media.

What has not been sufficiently grasped, however, are the theological implications of a change away from the biblical position where God is seen as supreme to the position where people's religious needs are seen as supreme.

In this process, faith also is transmuted away from an emphasis on the service of God to one of selection of aspects of faith and churches according to what one perceives one's needs are.

One of the central theological questions raised by the mass media for the Christian faith is: Is there a valid integration of the consumer philosophy with the Christian revelation? In what ways does faith and our church practises need to be changed to take account of consumerism, and in what ways does faith need to stand apart and challenge the society in the name of the One who is supreme, and jealous for love of his people?

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A third implication arises from the nature of television as an oral medium. For many centuries, the Christian faith has been a literate faith. Protestant churches in particular have placed great emphasis on The Word, and have stressed the intelligent integration of faith with the rest of life.

But television is less a literate, and more an "oral" form of communication. There are a number of theorists who suggest that through the influence of television, our society is becoming more "oral" in its thought-forms. (Would Joh Bjelke-Petersen be having the impact he is having in a literate society?) This is creating a national subconsciousness that benefits oral forms of religion over the literate forms.

Consider again the churches which are in growth patterns. Most tend to be "oral" rather than "literate" in nature. Their theological concepts tend to be basic and simple, even simplistic. They tend to stereotype in terms of opposites, dividing people into the saved and unsaved, good and bad, moral and immoral. They tend to be very literal in their view of the bible, finding if difficult to perceive the subtleties of literary analysis that most of us find basic, all of which are characteristics of oral cultures.

Their approach to theology and the Bible tends to be summed up by the bumper sticker I saw recently: "God said it, I believe it, and that's the end of it."

It is not just a simple matter of literate or liberal churches not selling themselves well enough. It is my proposition that, in many ways, television has had such a marked shaping effect on what people perceive as reality, that churches that stress a reasoned, literate, and immanental approach to religious faith will become more and more alienated from the masses (if they ever had any attraction to the masses!)

It may be that those churches which market their message by emphasising authority, personal success, health and prosperity through faith may have intuited the proper response of the Christian faith to the new cultural situation in which we find ourselves. Perhaps Jesus did the same and intuited the market potential of going to the deprived outcasts rather than the satiated religious. Perhaps the survival of the Christian faith in the 21st century may owe a lot to these churches. Perhaps the Uniting Church, with its dominant emphasis on being literate, rational, and democractic will find the future pretty rough going. Only time will tell!

What scares me, though, is the uncritical and unthoughtful way in which so many churches and movements are simply adapting to our mass culture without any sort of critique based on a well thought out biblical hermeneutic. The measure appears to be: if it brings in more people, do it.

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There are a number of other issues which a study of the mass media raise:

* In what ways does the personhood emphasis of the gospel relate to the efficiency emphasis of modern technology?

* In what ways does our doctrine of sin and human nature relate to the limit-less emphasis of modern technology?

* How does the servant of God emphasis of the gospel relate to the master nature of technology?

*How does the relationship orientation of the gospel relate to the information orientation of modern technology?

* What does it mean to stand with the poor in an age where information costs money?

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Finally, what should we do?

First, as religious communicators, and people training to be religious communicators, we need to study the characteristics of our mass media environment as carefully as did missionaries who related the gospel to foreign cultures.

There is a dominant attitude among many tertiary institutions, teachers, ministers, and other literati that television is of secondary importance, a lower form of culture that is best ignored or tolerated. What I have been suggesting is that we need to take television in particular and the mass media in general very seriously. Far from being a mild form of distracting entertainment, they are shaping an alternative world view that in many respects is diagonally opposed to the Christian world view. What a case study of the American evangelical broadcasters shows us is that in many ways the ideology of television shapes religion much more easily than religion shapes it.

Second, we need continually to be interpreting and relating the truth of our faith to the myths by which the mass media describe reality. In some cases faith may easily be re-expressed in mass media terms and images. In others, the Christian faith may pose a radical challenge to the way in which the mass media see the world and people in the world.

This process, of course, is not a new one. Every faithful preacher each Sunday applies the Word of God to the "sitz im leben" of his or her congregation. Rudolf Bultmann outlined the process with his concept of remythologisation. In doing this, Bultmann drew heavily on the existentialist philosophy of the early Heidegger for his cultural analysis. Perhaps the process needs to be repeated as our culture moves into new phases.

Third, we need to begin to educate ministers and people within our churches on how our lives and our children's lives are being shaped by media values and where Christian faith stands in relation to them. It is my observation that the dominant attitude to television is that it is very entertaining. There has been little common perception of its awesome power to shape and reshape social values, attitudes, and relationships.

I finish with one final perspective. The emphasis of our critique and proclamation must always be that of good news. Often we become condemnatory of television and other media for no other reason than we are jealous of the appeal and success they have, or because the Sunday night movie keeps people away from church.

But I have never been more confident than I am now of the potential there is for the church to model the richness and quality of inter-personal human relationship. As technology more and more forces people out of a meaningful participation in life, more and more will the church with its message of grace, of hope, of human integrity stand out.

If our message is one of good news, and it is lived with authenticity by those who have been grasped by it, surely the contrast between the life of the good news and the life of the bad news will become self-evident.

The Church and Electronic Culture

1. Background Perspectives

1. One of the most influential factors in cultural understanding and organisation is the communication patterns within that culture. The technological, social and power characteristics of the dominant media of communication in a society will have a strong influence on how the society organises, interacts & thinks about itself.

2. Different media of communication have different social and ideological characteristics and consequences. Major changes in means of communication within a society will have profound changes in how that society perceives and organises itself, and in its meaning and value systems.

3. Communication underlies and shapes the recognition and exercise of power within a society. Access to information and the means to communicate define who has power and who doesn’t and determine one’s "place" in social power structures.

4. The various media of social communication therefore are competitive (in the long term). Those means of communication which are competitive co-exist through a process of reordering and by carving out a competitive place and function within a social or economic market. Uncompetitive means of communication tend to atrophy.

2. Major Theses

1. We are currently in the midst of a major paradigm shift in world societies from primarily literate-based communication and social organisation to electronic-based communication. This shift is leading to major changes in cultural perception, thought and social organisation.

2. For the first time since the beginning of the Christian era, a communications system other than writing is the most powerful medium of non face-to-face communication. In this emergent electronic era, the most advanced and powerful communication now takes place through media which the church as the interpreter of the revelation of God has not mastered.

3. In this late 20th Century, churches face a situation unprecedented since the Church’s formation (comparable in magnitude to the era of the Christian apologists and the Reformation), in which most churches’ thought and practice - and by implication God’s revelation - are framed within and associated with communication and modes of thought of a past stage of cultural development.

The church throughout the history of its mission has frequently worked in oral cultures. But there the assumption of everyone - missionary and indigenous persons alike - was that the culture of literacy, the culture and communications system that the church had mastered and in which it held power, was superior._ Likewise, the church’s membership has often included a high level of illiterate people. But the leadership of the church for the past 1,500 years has generally been literate. The power of leadership has to large extent resided - reinforced by overt and covert reminders and strategies - in their perceived expertise in what has been seen as a superior culture, ie. the culture of books and book-based learning.

In our electronic age, however, the most advanced and powerful communications now takes place in media which the church as the interpreter of the revelation of God has not mastered. The challenge brought by these new media to the churches’ previous social and intellectual power is apparent. For that reason, the response of most Christian churches has consistently been one of active or passive resistance to electronic media, a position generally supported by most of the churches’ leaders and teachers (whose power is held by virtue of their expertise in the old literate. culture).

A change in the dominant media of mass communication in the culture creates a radically new situation for communication in general and, in particular, for the transmission and interpretation of the Bible and of God’s revelation. We now live in the period of greatest media change since the development and adaptation of writing. The development of global electronic media has transformed the communications systems of the world. But the world of biblical scholarship, theology and church practice is largely acting as if no change has taken place - our understanding and explanation of the meaning of revelation and the Bible is largely fixed in the old paradigm, putting most churches as institutions out of step and out of touch with the experience and culture of emerging generations.

In this posture of resistance the major Protestant churches which have been the most dominantly literate in their thought and practice and placed great emphasis on literate education(which includes the Uniting Church), are declining in numbers. They are facing a serious decline in finances (the economic displacement brought by changing media) and their membership is taking on the definite demographics of the specific sub-culture of older literacy, ie. older, educated, and middle class people.

Given that electronic culture produces in people quite different ways of perceiving reality and truth, Tom Boomershine, Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Ohio, suggests that what we need to do is undertake a radical re-examination of the "media system/culture" by which we understand and interpret revelation, in order to be able to transfer (communicate) the reality of that revelation into this radically different media/communication culture.

3. Major Eras in Cultural Communication

Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts in the history of science presents the idea that changes or increases in our understanding not only fill out gaps in previous knowledge, but at times bring about a reorganisation of the structure of the theories or paradigms by which previous ideas were organised and understood. Such a shift occurs when it becomes apparent that the old paradigm is no longer adequate to solve problems raised or new information or experience no longer fits the old paradigms.

The result is a stage of transition, with apparent contradictions or anomalies in what had been formerly accepted and recognised, tensions in the dominant paradigm, and an increase in new theories and types of research with new achievements being produced within the new.

In this state of transition, various candidates for a new paradigm arise and are tested. Frequently several camps emerge, committed to preserving the old or developing the new, until the new paradigm emerges. When a new paradigm emerges, the old is not simply done away with, but rather is taken up in a new way.

This framework is helpful for an analysis of changes in human societies based on changes in the major communication system. Several scholars have suggested a number of major stages in psycho-cultural evolution based on shifts in communication:

(i) primary oral culture

(ii) manuscript culture, emerging during the early Hellenistic period

(iii) print culture, emerging in the West at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation

(iv) silent print culture, emerging around the time of the Enlightenment

(v) secondary oral or electronic culture

There are a number of theories on why the form of communication shapes the nature of society. Some see the key in terms of the nature of the relationship established by the form of communication, others in terms of the dominant characteristics of the technology. For Walter Ong, a Jesuit theorist, of paramount importance in understanding the difference between oral and literate cultures are knowledge storage and retrieval devices. Primary oral cultures rely on the living human memory to store knowledge in formulary expressions. Literate cultures rely on knowledge stored in writing and later in printed books. When more knowledge was stored in books than ever before, the human mind was freed for other tasks & thinking was freed to be more abstract and specialised. I think all of those factors are relevant.

Characteristics of oral cultures

Pre-literate people are totally dependent for what they know for survival and meaning on what can be stored and retrieved from actual living human memory. Oral communication is also totally dependent on personal presence, which brings all of the senses into the communication. These factors create particular dynamics of thinking, being and social interaction, so that there are a number of characteristics of dominantly oral cultures:

* People tend to live in an all-at-once sense world using all senses.

* Sound is a dominant sense. Sound is seen as action and having power in itself.

* The physiology of sound produces an interiority of consciousness - sight externalises and individualises, sound incorporates.

* There are common verbal devices used for structuring memory, such as: thinking memorable thoughts; use of mnemonic, heavily rhythmic and balanced patterns; use of frequent repetitions or antitheses, alliterations and assonances; use of epithetic, formulaic, proverbial sayings; use of standard thematic settings

* Oral cultures tend to be conservative and traditionalist. Knowledge not repeated disappears, therefore communication is frequently redundant, back-looping, backward looking. Print allows mechanical retention - print cultures therefore are able to be more forward-looking

* Oral cultures tend to be close to the human life-world, (writing is able to be more abstracted); agonistic or narrative in nature or related to struggle (writing is able to disengage knowledge from the arena where the struggle is taking place); and empathetic & participatory (rather than objectively distanced).

* Oral cultures tend to be relationship oriented.

These characteristics can still be seen in cultures which still retain a strong oral character, such as some Pacific, Asian and African nations.

The Manuscript and Print Eras

In the development of human thought and perception, the shift from primary orality to vowelised literacy involves the movement from an implicit sense of things in concrete operational thinking to explicit concepts articulated through abstract thinking.

Alphabet communication tends to produce lineal cultures: segmented, linear and sequential. Through conditioning from the form of communication, literate people tend to be alphabet oriented and follow a linear pattern of thought, deduction & argument. The literate form of government is bureaucracy.

Some of the major psychodynamics of writing/print are:

* Writing establishes what has been called ‘context-free’ language. Written discourse is detached from the person of its author so that the author cannot be questioned or challenged.

* Writing establishes as outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind.

* Writing objectifies & distances ideas. It lacks the full dimensions of the spoken word: tone, intonation, interaction and personal presence.

* Writing creates the audience. As there is no present person, writing assumes a presence - I receive a written text as a constructed person or a member of a constructed audience.

* Literate cultures tend to promote dominance of the sense of sight over the sense of sound, leading to a possible physiological externalisation of sense/truth.

* Because the mind does not need continually to be focussing on the past in order to preserve memory, literate cultures are freed to be forward-looking rather than backward-looking, and sequential in thought rather than redundant or back-looping.

* The multiplication of thought and ideas in literate cultures enables them to go into greater detail and discrimination, creating segmentalisation of thought rather than an holistic picture.

Boomershine identifies a further development during the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and 19th and 20th centuries in America, a time of rapid technological advances in the production and distribution of written texts. During this time silent and individualised reading, rather than reading aloud or in gathered groups, became the normal mode for reception of written texts.(2) Boomershine sees historical criticism as the biblical method of this era, where the truth of the text is achieved by personal study of the text in silence on your own. Increasingly, he suggests as a biblical scholar, historical criticism is having diminishing value for eliciting lived truth from biblical texts.

Boomershine also suggests that the abstracted ideas of theology and doctrine were the means by which the early church adapted their largely oral, lived faith to the abstracted world of Greco-Roman manuscript culture. He asks whether, as we move into a new culture that is strongly oral in character, whether theology and doctrine are necessarily the best way of ensuring integrity and continuity of our faith tradition.

4. Electronic or Audio-visual Culture

Key electronic technologies

There are many new technologies which have made possible the cultural revolution that is now taking place in almost every part of life globally. Some of the key underlying technologies, as I see them, are the following.

Computers.

One of the major factors has been the increased capability of computers to process vast volumes of data. Computerised storing, condensing, selecting, integrating and re-presenting reality-data are making possible interconnections, applications, reorganisation and re-presentations of reality-data that is mind-blowing. The declining cost and increased availability of computer technology means that this technology is being extended into most areas of human living, literally reshaping human perception of reality.

The Enlightenment posited nature apprehended empirically as the basic reality. Electronic re-processing of reality, and the creation of virtual reality presents us not only with instrumental questions of how we use computers and keep up, but also with questions about what is reality and what reality do we address theologically.

Fibre optics.

Fibre optics have been decribed as "the biggest breakthrough in tele-communications since the invention of the telephone." Basically, in optical fibre technology, fibres comprised of tiny crystals the size of a grain of salt are used to produce light which carries information along the fibres. At the other end a receiver reverses the process and turns each light pulse into an electrical signal and reconstructs the information.

The greatest significance of fibre optics lies in its carrying capacity. One fibre, the thickness of a human hair, can carry 2,000 phone conversations, data, text or pictures at the same time. The difference: in 1956 there were 50 telephone circuits available on the first Trans Atlantic Telephone cable laid across the Atlantic. In 1989 an optical cable called TAT-8 began carrying up to 40,000 digital telephone calls under the Atlantic Ocean. The ease and rapidity of communication has expanded our points of reference away from the local to the global.

Digital Communication

Digital communication works by discerning and converting all information into discreet sequences of on-off pulses, corresponding with the 0 and 1 binary code used by computers.

The significance of digital communication is that it has created a common language for communication of all information. Previously different media used different technology, processes, machines and information languages. The development of digital communication has made possible the integration of all forms of communication and information within the same electronic language. The development of advanced computer technology makes possible the analysis and conversion of all information in this language very, very quickly.(3)

This has enabled the development of a range of new technologies, storage, integration and analysis of data, and multiple applications.

ISDN - International Switching Digital Network

Work is progressing on the development of a single, unified international communication grid to transmit all audio, text, video and computer data, both nationally and internationally. Integrating fibre optics, satellites, and other technologies, there is being created an actual global village which will tie together business, homes, entertainment and computers.

ISDN allows continuous data and voice transfer in all directions at the highest possible speed using digital technology. This will include and enable such things as telephone, videophone, telex, fax, slow-scan television, local area networks, video-conferences, data terminals and exchange of data banks, personal computers and telephone exchanges all on the same network. Transmitting 64,000 bits of information per second, a page of text can be transmitted in just one second on an ISDN Fax line. Data can even be stored until the receiver is ready to receive it.

This will allow integration of data into one cross-related data bank and give high-speed access to all sorts of information for those who have the equipment and the money to use it. The Internet is just one example of this, a computer network allowing next-to-instant access and communication with people, groups and data libraries next door or on the other side of the world.

The shift to electronic culture

The impact of the technologies and institutions of electronic culture need to be understood in relation to their intertwinement with two other major modern movements, each of which is dependent on the other. One is the vast expanse of technological/scientific development, spurred by the Enlightenment ideology of progress and conquest, which has provided almost unlimited (albeit particular) insights into how things work and amazing machinery for controlling, changing and creating physical processes and products.

The second is consumer capitalism, the intricate socio-economic system that taps the human drives of individual gain and greed, rewarding incentive and encouraging participation in the system by the prospect of increased consumption of pleasurable goods or services and access to otherwise restricted activities.

In many ways the development of each of these would not have been possible without the infrastructure and support of the other. Together they have brought about a profound shift in the nature of thought, the directions and balance of the different spheres of human society, and the interrelatedness of human institutions.

The suggestion is that in our current era we are in the middle of a profound paradigm shift, brought about by the emergence and now dominance of electronic forms of social communication and their supporting ideological and economic structures. It is necessary to remember that such a paradigm shift does not occur overnight - paradigm shifts generally occur over a long period of time, with pockets of thought frequently unaffected by the new for a long period, and often with movement taking place back and forth between paradigms until the new paradigm becomes "settled" and existing social systems are reintegrated.

It is important also to remember that a shift into a new social paradigm does not simply dispense with the old. The old is brought into or taken up into the new, but in a new way or with new meaning. The growth of electronics has not done away with printing or print-based cultures or sub-cultures, for example. In fact most electronics are dependent on print and in many cases some forms of reading have increased. What has happened, however, is that how print is used and seen is being transformed. How and what texts are produced, what people read, and what people look for in reading is changed. These changes also change the structures of power in our society, so that, for example, literate people who know how to access electronic information will have increased power over literate people who don’t.

Walter Ong proposes that electronic culture has characteristics more resemblant of oral cultures than literate cultures. According to Ong, electronic culture is essentially literate but involving a new sensory mix that accentuate sound and pictures. This he calls a "secondary orality". The nature of that blend of both primary orality and literacy is still emerging.

"This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even in its use of formulas .... Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture - McLuhan’s ‘global village’. Moreover, before writing, oral folk were group-minded because no feasible alternative had presented itself. In our age of secondary orality, we are group-minded self-consciously and programmatically."(4)

Pierre Babin provocatively suggests that one of the keys to understanding the difference between the new electronic, audio-visual culture in which we now live and the previous dominantly literate culture lies in the shift of sense from the externalised abstract truth of the eye to the internalised, participatory truth of the ear.

"McLuhan suggests that the ground - what frames and contextualises explicit figures - is the determining component of the mediated message.... I came to see that it is often not the explicit message or the rationalistic arguments that are most important in communicating faith, but the deeper tones of feeling and background..... These media are not just technologies transporting content, but they form a world, an enveloping environment like the countryside, which everywhere surrounds us with its rhythms of life and its mechanism for coping with problems." (5)

Babin suggests that the change in dominant communication forms has actually brought about a shift in dominant sensory perception. With electronic culture, he suggests, the resonance of sound has become the dominant mode of communication and conveyor of truth, rather than sight (as in reading books to discern ideas).

For those bred in the abstract, "objective" world of print, such characteristics reek of a decline into undefined "subjectivism". What has happened, rather, is that the new revolution in electronic communication has broken the monopoly of print and the visual senses. Electronic communications are not just "aids" or tools for communicating - they are a language in themselves. They have brought with them a new, all-encompassing culture that is creating a new way of perceiving and relating to reality which is more oriented towards getting all the senses into the act: aural, oral, tactile, kinetic. This is a style of communication that is "messy" for those bred with the clean "logical" world of print culture’s abstracted ideas.

It is this shift in how truth is perceived and appropriated that is one of the factors creating resistance to electronic culture by theologians and clergy, whose understanding of faith has been strongly shaped by the characteristics and requirements of print culture in which they were educated and by virtue of which they hold status and power.(6) They tend to see in the focus on feeling and background and the lack of discrimination of specific ideas a compromise of faith and truth (See, eg. Jacques Ellul, The humiliation of the Word).

I propose that what we are dealing with is not a decline in culture, to be fought against and resisted. It is rather a change in culture, as ambiguous and as potentially good and bad as any other culture. And whether we like it or not, it is the culture in which most people within our society, most people within our churches, and we ourselves are now living. If the incarnation is to be communicated, that is the culture in which it must be incarnated. Like other cultures, it needs discernment, encouragement and critique. But if such critique is to be effective, like all cross-cultural communication, it needs to be in terms the culture recognises and from people whom it is perceived appreciate and understand the culture.

For Babin, the changes brought by electronic communication constitute the development of a new culture which present those of us educated within a literate world with a radical challenge.

"To understand the reality of our times more profoundly, we have to break out of circles confining our vision....It is impossible to have real intercultural communication in the electronic age without leaving ‘your country and your kindred and your father’s house’ (Gen 12:1). Becoming a full person in the electronic age is not playing with a camera; it is being born to the depths of humanity for which our previous education has not prepared us....we shall have to enter this new universe with the same enormous sympathy that Christ has for this earth." (pp.16-17.)

5. Implications for the church

Since the gospel is always received and appropriated in a specific cultural form, and since the church is established and functions as a social institution, the changes that are taking place in global societies have profound implications for churches (as profound, some have suggested, as our initial transition from a regional Jewish Jesus movement into a global Gentile church).

I do not see many of the challenges before us as necessarily unique ones. Nor are they necessarily bad or destructive. Some criticisms of post-modern electronic culture reflect the threat being felt by people whose power base lies in the differently ordered literate societies. However, if seen as the characteristics of a new culture into which we are moving, they present themselves simply as a new context within which the Gospel needs to be embodied and contextualised. Useful for guidance, therefore, may be previous work that has been done on inter-cultural communication and on indiginisation of the gospel.

These changes also place the church as an institution in a different power relationship to the culture than it has previously held since Constantinian times. The church’s position moving into the new may also be more akin to experiences of marginalisation experienced by such groups in our churches as women and ethnic minorities than by male church leaders who lack experience in dealing with marginalisation, or by the church in Asia than in Europe and U.S.A.

Some of the implications that I think these changes in culture have for the church are the following broad issues.

The expansion and commercialisation of communication institutions.

Whereas once communication was understood and legislated broadly in terms of the community "good", communication has now become strongly dominated by commercial interests. Rather than conceptualising a larger community to which media outlets have a social responsiblity, society tends now to be seen commercially as a composition of smaller "markets", to which the various media address themselves.

The media themselves are undergoing massive change. On one hand there is a growing diversity of sources: cable television, satellite broadcasting, VCR, desk-top publishing. With the multiplication of media outlets of all sorts, production or publishing has moved away from the principle of publishing what is significant to producing material to fill available time slots. The guiding principle, whether for electronic or print or whatever, is whether one can find a market (a group of people with something in common) sufficiently large to sustain financially the publication.

This leads to and supports the principle of subdivision of people into various markets. People don’t belong to communities as much as they belong a variety of different markets. eg. church members - church is one "belonging" along with many others.

While there is a diversity of outlets, there is a parallel concentration of control and ownership in commercial media. So this diversity of sources does not necesssarily lead to a diversity of content. The question behind diversity of content is not whether there is different material - rather whether there is genuine diversity of communal viewpoint represented. While the diversity of content is limited only by the ability to find a new market which will sustain a new outlet, there is a fairly well-defined and narrow mainstream of ideology, ie. western consumer capitalism.

The widespread influence of consumerist ideology.

The widespread promotion of the products of western capitalism, coupled with increased availability of goods and the sustained cultivation of desire through commercial media, has led to a profound influence of the philosophy of consumerism in western societies and increasingly in developing countries as well. Far from being just a marketing of goods and services, consumerism promotes a comprehensive philosophy of life that has profound religious dimensions, specifically

* we all have needs and wants

* we all have a right to have those needs and wants met

* we are the best arbiters of what our needs and wants are

* the society’s obligation is to create a climate in which our needs and wants can be identified and satisfied

* the purpose of life is principally to satisfy or work towards the satisfaction of those needs and wants

* needs and wants are satisfied principally through the acquisition of products or services

* while satisfaction of our needs and wants may be temporarily delayed, sustained denial of satisfaction to significant wants and needs is dehumanising and requires action to correct it

One of the significant effects of this lies in the commercial process of commoditisation, where non-commercial, social activities are reformed, packaged and sold as commercial products or commodities. The competition now generated in the communication marketplace means that in order to survive communication institutions must beome aggressive imperialist organisations.(7)

It is instructive to note how significant an influence consumerism has had as a philosophy, even as a hermeneutical lens through which Christian faith is understood and interpreted.(8) Yet rarely has the church addressed this aspect of culture in a sustained and balanced way that helps its adherents live faithful lives within this particular culture.

Changes in people’s relationship to the media.

The dominant theory of the media to this point has been one in which the media have been seen primarily as one social institution among others. In this view, it has been assumed there is an separate social norm or reality and the media primarily act as tools for communicating this reality. The dominant approach therefore has been to study the "effects" the media have on people. In this view, institutions such as the church have tended to look at the media instrumentally, ie. how can we use the media best to convey "our reality". In recent years, however, there have been several major shifts in thinking about media.

One change has been away from seeing the media as just one aspect of culture. Rather the media, as it were, form the "web" of the culture, the matrix where most people now get most of their insight, influence, values and meaning. In this view, institutions do not use the media to communicate their reality - rather, institutions are placed on the web of culture in different positions and for different purposes.

The second major change has been in shifting the centre of focus and attention in thinking about media away from the intended effects of media messages toward the active role audiences play in selection and use of their own media-mix for meaning-seeking and meaning-satisfying purposes. On a broad scale, people increasingly tend not to see the media through lenses developed through their enculturation in other social collectives. The media are such an inextricable part of our lives and culture that we now see all other social collectives (including our religious faith) through the lens of our enculturation in media.(9)

The crucial dimension to note about this is that people are not passive recipients who require protection against "harmful" media messages.

"This relationship between people and media is entirely a volitional one....People live on the media "map" because they want to, and more importantly, because that map is an authentic one for them." (10)

That is, people are not passive recipients of media messages generated by commercial media organisations. People now participate in the media-web of culture, not because they are coerced or duped into doing so, but because they choose to do so, they get enjoyment out of it, and it is meaningful and authentic for them.

What we need to realise is, the same applies for religious or "Christian" people or church members who are themselves members of and immersed in this culture. The church as organisation may no longer be the main source of religious information, truth or practice even for its own members.

Changes in churches’ visibility in the public realm

In the electronic era the church has largely been displaced from the public realm. Previously the Church, along with the State, was a major direct participant and influence in the public realm, with substantial control over how it was represented in the public realm. Today, however, "an independent institution of publicity and publication - the media - predominates, and the Church and the State must submit themselves to this ‘media sphere’."(11)

Losing its power to control how its symbols were used and how it is represented publicly has created confusion in most churches about how to participate publicly without privilege. Confusion about its public role has further diminished church institutions’ relevance and visibility in public debate and issues. Because both people in society and people in our churches live in the public realm, and because existence in the public realm validates authority and relevance, the absence of church presence in the public realm of the media diminishes people’s perception of the relevance of faith to their everyday existence - ie. their real life.

An urgent issue for churches, therefore, is to rethink the relationship between the gospel and culture, in a situation where almost every function the church used to serve is now alternatively available as a (often more attractive) consumer commodity, where we can no longer control how we are represented or how our symbols are used, and how we are going to exercise influence as a diminishing minority in a utilitarian culture.

Changes in the nature of community and effects on the church as community

Gabriel Bar-Haim suggests that in this post-modern, mediated era, there has been a shift in the way in which people view and participate in community.(12) The consumer orientation of electronic culture and the expansion of widely advertised and available alternatives has brought a shift away from a committed and sacrificial relationship to organically-integrated communities towards one where as individuals we construct our own individualised networks characterised by tentativeness and usefulness.

The readily availability of any number of alternatives in almost every area of life (from toothpaste to intimate relationship to spiritual life) has meant that there has been a shift in participation away from durable loyalty to one commitment towards selection of a mix of alternatives on the basis of their usefulness and enjoyment. People now tend not to be shaped and defined by our membership of a signficant single community (such as the church) because that community has a compelling sense of "otherness". We now tend to be more self-defining within a personally constructed mix of utilitarian networks.

The loss of a compelling sense of otherness in social institutions is accompanied by a sense that the orders we participate in are transitory, relative, or artifically constructed and controlled. Social communities, therefore, are increasingly being given only a tentative commitment.

How the church sees and offers itself as community, cultivates loyalty, and embodies authority in such a competitive culture is an important question to be faced. For too long, I think, we have counted on our social privileges as a religious monopoly and maintained that by the suppression of alternatives. Rapidly churches and church leaders are losing the perception that we have unique "divine authority". In future we will be recommended only to the extent that we have private and public integrity; what we say and do makes sense, is interesting and is useful; and we are known to back up what we say by what we do, even if it costs us.

In communication, we need to recognise that communicating, even with our own members, is now an open, competitive marketplace. Communicating to members may be ineffectual if we are assuming they’re interested, or that the church commands greater interest because of their loyalty. Perhaps we need to explore reforming all our communications to make them (1) competitive to all other communications in terms of their usefulness to members’ lives; (2) made easily accessible for when members want to use them, rather than thrust on them involuntarily; and (3) the accessibility advertised rather than the information given.

Changes in the nature of social institutions and effects on the church as institution

There are now all sorts of different agencies that have become part of the commoditisation process of late capitalism, specialised intermediary agencies that aggressively identify and sell services to meet needs of all sorts that once were the province of religious and humanitarian bodies: mass media, advertising offices, computer networks, leisure clubs, adult education classes, therapy support groups, volunteer political organisations, international exchange programs, manpower offices, travel agencies, etc.

In order to survive in this environment, people have developed quite refined skills in consumer discernment. Characteristic of consumerist post-modernism is a scepticism about the self-interest of what is offered or made available. Along with this is a bringing into the light of personal and institutional acts of destructiveness and self-contradiction that previously were taboo or that institutions had the power to keep hidden.

Hoover suggests therefore that the postmodern era is typified by a decline in formal institutions of all kinds. Today...all institutions are being questioned. With the constant influx of information, perceptions are continually being shifted. As in oral cultures, it is necessary for communal memory and attitudes to be cultivated and renewed more deliberately within the public sphere through repetition and ritual.(13)

It is of note that those churches which are now growing the fastest are those which eschew institutional trappings, and which can therefore at least present the impression that they are less likely to have an institutional moribundity and self-interest.(14) There are echoes here of the apostle Paul’s recognition, reflected in several of his letters, of the importance of general social trust and respect of church leaders and members as a necessary framework for communication of the gospel.

The reformation of moral structures

One of the major effects that the new web of electronic culture has lies in the reformation of moral structures - what is sometimes called destructuring. Whether it is a breakup of moral structures towards a condition of social amorality or relativism, or a reformation of moral structures may be open to debate.

There are several reasons for this reformation: (1) an emphasis on and desire for, and consumption of information for information’s sake; (2) the lack of practical differentiation between different types and value of different information; (3) the lack of practical opportunity to live out a commitment to one body of information over another; (4) the constant influx and renewal of information makes durability and relevance of structure difficult; (5) lack of skill in the implementation of silence makes discernment of moral value difficult.

The way this works is best illustrated by several quotes from Pierre Babin:(15)

"The process of destructuring takes place irresistibly, just as water dripping steadily on a rock....this happens because gradually but irresistably the media bring everything - all acts of violence and all the opinions of the world - into the family or local circle....Everything....comes to us piece by piece, without any logical connection..."

"So, we hear, read, and see countless things that mean nothing to us, either at the level of usefulness or at the spiritual level....What counts is not the rational structure of a good basic training, but being in the flow of information. When I read my newspapers and magazines on the train, I am not consolidating my mind, but developing my membership of the world....adapting myself correctly to this world."

"In the past, when you went to Mass on Sunday, the parish priest’s sermon took up the whole day and even the whole week. But now I receive fifty pieces of news on the same day in addition to my parish priest’s sermon."

"Beyond such information, there is emotion in what we are offered, which, even more than the lack of logic, keeps us in a permanent state of masked shock....after so many of these pinpricks, which are like the drops of water on stone, we too shall crumble into fragments."

"Finally, in free-market economies, destructuring is brought about by a strange law of journalism and the media that dictates that the only interesting things are those that depart from the norm."

"Watching a broadcast, the child is aware of a series of moments rather than logical development....flicking through and mixing....They become disjointed. They lose the solid bars that the linear logic of the book had given them.... And what can a child think, spending life watching television? Surely that there are no more rules, that what is exciting is life itself, and that in such a life everything is possible and everything is permitted."

Our Christian faith is a moral or ethical faith, ie. faith is demonstrated in outward behaviour. The changes in social structures of moral action, which previously were strongly linked to and supportive of Christian faith, has important implications both to how we conceive our relationship as Christians to our host society, and how we nurture ethical behaviour within adherents of the Christian faith who also participate fully as members of this society.

NOTES

(1) Therefore an essential part of the missionary movement was to teach people to read, both as a means of extending the church’s mission, as a way of bringing what was seen to be practical "improvement" or progress to a missioned culture, but also to reinforce the superiority of the particular media culture within which the church’s power was based over the indigenous oral culture, in which the church didn’t hold power.

(2) This has been formalised by the techniques of speed reading, the learned method of consuming multiple texts quickly, which stress not mouthing the words as one reads. This development of silent print has had an influence on how the bible is consumed, for instance. The bible became a text to be studied in silence, with the truth of the text becoming increasingly separated from the sound of the text. Public readings of scripture now tend to deemphasise sound - scripture readings in worship tend to be almost mechanistic and without passion or drama.

(3) Technology has been or is being developed that uses the numbers 0-9 as the basis of digital communication, rather than the numbers 0-1, which will increase the speed of computers 8-fold.

(4) Orality and Literacy, pp.136-7

(5) The new era in religious communication, pp. 9-10

(6) It is interesting to note that the emergence of Reformed theology concurred with the emergence of mass print in Europe. The printing press gave Martin Luther an alternative base of power and influence against the organisational power of the Roman Catholic church. Luther’s theology was a reappropriation of the earlier manuscript theology of Augustine - one could speculate it was a practical appropriation of manuscript theology into the new paradigm of print. Reformed theology has been a strongly literate-based, clerical theology, most of it developing and being disseminated within academies/seminaries, the centres of book-learning. One of the practical theological tensions within reformed churches has been between the literate-based academic theology of the clergy and the largely oral practical theology of the people.

(7) For example, in recent decades the personal motivation and esteem dimension of the Christian faith has been siphoned off, repackaged as motivational seminars, and sold to people for anything from $50 to $1000 a pop. The new preachers of our culture are the dinner speakers and personal motivation gurus. Note also the development in recent years of extensive and increasingly aggressive marketing data banks (eg. fly buys) in which personal consumer information is accumulated, to befarmed in order to identify new patterns of consumer behaviour and needs. This information will become the source for development and packaging of products, addressed to identified individuals, to fill those needs - the commercial equivalent of pastoral care by product.

(8) Note, for eg. the commoditisation and advertising of faith "products" and religious "services", church growth philosophy, and the appeal to what’s in it for the participant in many different ways - see Horsfield, "Church shopping: a hazard to the health of he Kingdom?" On Being, 1986 and Hoover, "The cross at Willow Creek".

(9) For a further development of this, see my article "Teaching theology in a new cultural environment," in Chris Arthur (ed.) Religion and the Media: An Introductory Reader.

(10) Stewart Hoover, "Mass media and religious pluralism," in Phillip Lee (ed.) The democratisation of communication. Forthcoming.

(11) Ibid

(12) "The disappearing sacred: anomie and the crisis of the ritual." Unpublished paper.

(13) One can note, for example, the intention behind major advertising campaigns simply to renew brand recognition through the ritualistic repetition of slogans and sales dramas. Even large and solid social institutions like AMP, for example, identified this changing attitude towards institutions (in research by Hugh Mackay). The AMP’s most recent advertising campaing featured ads specifically designed to cultivate and reinforce the feeling that AMP was an institution that was dependable and would be here for a long time, and therefore could be trusted.

(14) Of particular interests here is the effect on perceptions of the church in the public sphere of recent news of clergy sexual misconduct. I propose that in this particular issue, where the church has had a marvellous opportunity to project itself into the public sphere as an institution that can be trusted, and to proclaim in deed the gospel of justice and restoration, the church’s actions have contradicted its gospel message. Church pronouncements and responses to this issue have projected the message of a self-interested, defensive, and suspect institution, messages that are read and understood very accurately by the general public.

(15)The new era in religious communication, pp. 41-44.

The Bible and Communication

The communication situation today

The development of electronic technologies for storing and transferring information in the past two generations has been exponential. Things are now being done in electronic communication which once would have been thought impossible.

These developments have changed not only the speed and way in which we now communicate: they have also changed the way our societies are organised, how we relate to each other, what we think is important, and how we think and expect our social institutions (including the church) to function.

It is my contention that the mass media have become so integrated and extensive - technologically, economically and socially - that they have gone beyond being just instruments for social communication. The mass media together have shaped a new international culture and ideology whose web now touches, influences and in some cases dominates every other cultural system.

In previous times we lived and worked within the context of the natural environment. Today the environment within which most of us live and work is a media environment, an over-arching web of mediated symbols, processes, stories and values that surrounds, gives shape to, and interprets most things we do as individuals and as a society. While the natural world is still there, touching us through the seasons and weather, natural disasters and occasional recreation, the natural world is no longer the major thing with which we contend. The world that has greater impact on our decision-making, value formation, relationships and self-perception is the technological-mediated world, not the natural world.

The broader dimensions of this change are significant. The world of nature, because of its grandeur and sense of uncontrollability, carried with it the "suspicion" that there is something greater than us, something with which we need to contend. This greatness of nature traditionally has been a significant foundation for our understanding of God. Paul alludes to this in Romans: "(God’s) eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him." (Romnot only absent, God is not necessary. The "otherness" we experience in this world is seeing something awesome that makes us feel humble; it is the disequilibrium we feel when we see others with things that we don’t have. "Mystery" in the media likewise is not an experience of awe and humility: it is an experience of technological curiosity ("How did they do that?") or functional strategy ("How can I get it?").

This is not to say that people have become totally submissive to a technological/consumer world-view: we are not robots to a technological pre-determinism. But it is important to understand that the actual world in which we live, not just the immediate processes we live by, has changed in the last three decades and this change is influencing the way we see things and make decisions and judgments.

The relevance of the Bible

In what ways can the Bible, a book from a largely agricultural, pre-industrial, and pre-electronic culture, have any bearing on how we should live and work out our faith in such a global media-dominated culture today? It is important that we find a way of practically connecting the Bible and our media culture, otherwise we run several risks.

First, there is the risk of separating private faith and devotion from public decision making and ethical behaviour. Because the Bible doesn’t speak directly about the mass media, it can be easy to see the Bible as the authority for the personal aspects of our lives and then simply assume that people who are good personally will automatically know how to be good publicly or corporately. That is not a correct assumption.

Second, we run the risk of seeing the Bible as relevant only for those forms of communication that were known in biblical times. There are a number of excellent books, for example, which give a biblical account of communication, without saying anything about technological communication.

A third risk is that we select out bits of the Bible that suit our ideas about mass media but ignore other parts that would challenge those ideas. When someone says "This is what the Bible says about Christian use of mass media," it generally says as much about the context and agenda of the person doing the interpreting as it does about the biblical message. For example, the Bible is frequently quoted in support of opposition to portrayals of sex and violence in the media but not often to challenge the practice of western media corporations destroying poorer indigenous cultures by selling cheap western entertainment that under-cuts local programming, even though protection of the poor is a strong biblical message.

Making connections

How then can we make necessary connections between the Bible and modern communications? My perspective is that there are a number of connections that arise both from the issues that confront us as Christians living in a mass media age and from the Bible’s insistent message.

1. The Biblical message supports a quality of communication that is strongly personal-communal. The existence of things and people is an expression of the personal quality of God’s justice-love and God actively seeks an ongoing just and loving relationship with what is created. God encourages this relationship to be robust and interactive involving qualities of comfort and challenge, initiative and response, question and answer, closeness and distance, lament and laughter, complaint and reassurance, defence and vulnerability, on both sides. Even in revelation, God gives people the freedom to participate, to see or not to see.

The supreme expression of this personal nature of God’s communication is in the person, Jesus of Nazareth, the "Word made flesh" (John 1:14), whose nature was to liberate humans to their full humanity (Luke 4, etc) and to restore intimate relationship (communion) between creation and God (II Cor 5:18-21).

Because it is a reflection of God’s nature and God’s way of doing things, establishing, maintaining and developing full and robust relationships between creation, God and people-in-community should be the quality that characterises Christian communication.

This perspective should guide us in evaluating not just the content of communication but also the method of communication. The central message of the Christian gospel is that the method by which God’s redemptive love was shown was not in sending an edited message or program, nor by sending an inter-media-ry, but by being there personally in Jesus Christ, vulnerable to our pain, desolation, disease, anger and retribution - in fact being killed by it. The method by which we communicate as Christians has meaning, not just the content of our communication.

2. Mass media are just one aspect within the whole spectrum of communication. We have come to believe in the past two decades that mass media are the most important, most influential and most necessary forms of communication. We have come to this belief, not because of clear findings of research, but because of the way in which technology and technological development are revered, marketed and used within our society. The result is that for many countries and organisations (and even churches) developing communication is now understood mainly as buying new machines for processing information or broadcasting programs.

Communication research indicates, however, that in many ways inter-personal and group communication is still more effective for achieving understanding of issues, conveying information and influencing decisions, and are more enjoyed for relaxation and entertainment than are mass media. Inter-personal communication is still the most effective means of evangelism. If we applied a biblical perspective in assessing new technology, and if the same amount of energy and resources had been devoted to the development of inter-personal and community-based communication as have been devoted to technological communication, we may have achieved a richer more satisfying alternative way of living together.

3. Communication involves much more than just what we do as humans. Communication is the breath (pneuma or spirit) of our common existence. The world is dependent on and affected by inter-relationship (communication) between all things - even animals and what we have thought to be inanimate objects.

This is the biblical perspective of creation: that we are born into a world that is given to us and not something of our own making (Genesis 1-2, Psalm 8); that humans have a place within it but not the place (Job 34:14-15); that the whole of this creation is interconnected and in constant communication with itself in a complex way (Rom 8:29-23) and that nature experiences destructive consequences as a result of human disobedience of God (see for example Genesis 3, 1 Kings 17-18, Romans 8). Yet we have gone ahead with development that breaks ecological chains, ignores complex interrelationships between people, animals and things, and assumes that human activity and progress can take place without consideration of other aspects of creation.

4. The mass media reflect values that are challenged by biblical values. Studies have shown for a number of decades that the mass media reflect common patterns of underlying themes, motifs and values across different media and a wide range of programming.

While Christians frequently take action in relation to specific objectionable aspects of programming, what we have not yet addressed are the broader, repetitive underlying values that are changing not just particular ideas but the whole structure of our perception. These underlying "mythological" patterns include, for example:

the inescapable requirement that things be entertaining;

the idea that it’s necessary to know as much as possible about as many things as possible, rather than limit what we know about in order to have time to act compassionately and justly;

the idea that there should be something in it "for me" to justify my involvement in something;

the idea that struggle and adversity are bad and should be avoided or got out of as soon as possible;

the idea that most of life’s problems can be solved by buying or acquiring something to fix it - one’s life will therefore be better the more one can buy more goods or go more places.

These values are rarely addressed specifically by the Bible, but many of the Bible’s teachings and emphases contradict and challenge them. How does one present a gospel of loving sacrifice on media that demand that things be entertaining?

5. The Bible gives a place of special importance to those people who are powerless, in need, or marginalised. More than just requiring us to remember them, the Bible actually makes our relationship and empowerment of them the measure of our faithfulness and stewardship to God ("Whatever you did for one of the least of these....you did it for me." (Matt 25:40)).

In this context, a courageous acceptance of the biblical view of communication and God’s seeking and transforming justice-love turns upside down our normal way of looking at power, ethics, organisation and communication (see, for eg. Matt 18:1-5, Matt 19:30, Luke 1:52-53, I Cor 1:27-29, and I Cor 12:24 "God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member...").

This perspective of the central importance of the powerless challenges all our Christian communication and proclamation. Christian preachers, biblical scholars, theologians, writers, conference speakers, broadcasters and Christian media organisations have immense power by having access to opportunities for communication that others don’t have. On whose behalf do we use this power? One can get the impression on occasion that much of the church’s communication, and much of the mass communication efforts of Christians, are directed more towards promoting the self-interest of the speaker, building a Christian power base, or furthering the goals of the Christian organisation than for the purpose of serving Christ by advocating, representing or empowering those who are silenced in their powerlessness.

To that extent, a biblical view of communication challenges and confronts not only the content, but also the power structures, methods and motives of mass communication, even our "Christian" mass communication. (Though we need to note that while the Bible speaks consistently for justice and for siding with the poor it offers little that is unambiguous about policy and strategy for achieving it - another example of how God gives plenty of scope to us to participate in creation-redemption by using our imagination and initiative!)

FOR FURTHER THOUGHT

discussion starters

1. The biblical message always finds expression in a new culture by affirming some aspects of the culture and challenging others. What aspects of media culture do you think the biblical message affirms, and what do you think it challenges?

2. What happens to the meaning of the message, "God loves you!" when it is spoken by one person, edited, to a million people at once via a book, television or radio rather than one person talking to another?

3. Do the media encourage us to believe that it’s important to know as much as possible about as many things as possible? What would be the implications if we decided to limit the amount of things we knew about in order to have time to do something compassionate about a fewer number of things? How would you go about it?

4. Is entertainment contrary to God’s nature? Is too much entertainment contrary to God’s nature? How much entertainment is too much entertainment? Should some things be entertaining and others not entertaining?

5. What implications does Paul’s statement, "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong" (I Cor 1:27) have for the way we communicate as Christians?

God’s Way of Acting

Jesus' birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants. Christmas looms large in our culture, outshining even Easter in the popular mind. Yet without Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 we would know nothing about it. Paul's gospel includes Jesus' Davidic descent (Rom. 1:3), but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John's wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God's glory is revealed not in the manger; but on the cross. If you try to express any New Testament theology without Jesus' death and resurrection, you will find it cannot be done. "Man shall live for evermore," says the song, "because of Christmas Day." No, replies the New Testament. Because of Calvary, Easter and Pentecost.

Nevertheless, the birth stories have become a test case in various controversies. If you believe in miracles, you believe in Jesus' miraculous birth; if you don't, you don't. Both sides turn the question into a shibboleth, not for its own sake but to find out who's in and who's out. Problem: "miracle," as used in these controversies, is not a biblical category. The God of the Bible is not a normally absent God who sometimes "intervenes." This God is always present and active, often surprisingly so.

Likewise, if you believe the Bible is "true," you will believe the birth stories; if you don't, you won't. Again, the birth stories are insignificant in themselves; they function as a test for beliefs about the Bible.

The birth stories have also functioned as a test case for views of sexuality. Some believers in the virginal conception align this with a low view of sexuality and a high view of perpetual virginity. They believe the story not because of what it says about Jesus, but because of what it says about sex-namely, that it's something God wouldn't want to get mixed up in. This, too, has its mirror image: those who cannot imagine anything good about abstinence insist that Mary must have been sexually active.

More significantly, the birth stories have played a role within different views of the incarnation. Those who have emphasized Jesus' divinity have sometimes made the virginal conception central. Those who have emphasized Jesus' humanity have often felt that the virginal conception would mark him off from the rest of us.

None of these arguments bears much relation to what either Matthew or Luke actually says. But before we turn to them, two more preliminary remarks.

First, we are of course speak ing of the virginal conception of Jesus, not, strictly, of the "virgin birth." Even if I come to of the virginal conception of Jesus, not, strictly, of the "virgin birth." Even if I come to believe in the former; the latter would remain a different sort of thing altogether. Neither; of course, should be confused with the "immaculate conception," a Roman Catholic dogma about the conception not of Jesus, but of Mary.

Second, some things must be put in a "suspense account," in Marcus Borg's happy phrase, while others are sorted out. The birth narratives have no impact on my reconstruction of Jesus' public agendas and his mind-set as he went to the cross. There might just be a case for saying that if his birth was as Matthew and Luke describe it, and if Mary had told him about it, my argument about Jesus' vocation to do and be what in scripture YHWH does and is might look slightly different. But as a historian I cannot use the birth stories within an argument about the rest of the gospel narratives.

I can, however, run the process the other way. Because I am convinced that the creator God raised Jesus bodily from the dead, and because I am convinced that Jesus was and is the embodiment of this God, Israel's God, my worldview is forced to reactivate various things in the suspense account, the birth narratives included. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in post-Enlightenment metaphysics. The "closed continuum" of cause and effect is a modernist myth. The God who does not "intervene" from outside but is always present and active within the world, sometimes shockingly, may well have been thus active on this occasion. It is all very well to get on one's high metaphysical horse and insist that God cannot behave like this, but we do not know that ahead of time. Nor will the high moral horse do any better insisting that God ought not to do things like this, because they send the wrong message about sexuality or because divine parentage gave Jesus an unfair start over the rest of us. Such positions produce a cartoon picture: the mouse draws itself up to its full height, puts its paws on its hips and gives the elephant a good dressing down.

The stories in question are complex and controversial. I simply highlight certain features.

Matthew's story, told from Joseph's point of view, reminds one of various biblical birth stories, such as that of Samson in Judges 13. Matthew's whole hook is about the scriptures being fulfilled in Jesus. The angel, the dream, the command not to be afraid, the righteous couple doing what they are told-all is familiar. Like Samson, the promised and provided child has a dangerous public future: here, the true king of the Jews is born under the nose of the wicked king, Herod. This is a major theme in Matthew's Gospel. His picture of Jesus' messiahship has both feet on the ground of first-century realpolitik.

Matthew tells us that Jesus fulfills at least three biblical themes. He brings Israel into the promised land; "Jesus" is the Greek for "Joshua." As Immanuel, he embodies God's presence with his people (Isaiah 7:14, quoted in 1:23). As the new David, he is the Messiah born at Bethlehem (2:5, fulfilling Micah 5:1-3). In the genealogy, Jesus is the point toward which Israel's long covenant history has been leading, particularly its puzzling and tragic latter phase. Matthew agrees with his Jewish contemporaries that the exile was the last significant event before Jesus; when the angel says that Jesus will "save his people from their sins" (1:21), liberation from exile is in view. Jesus, David's true descendant, will fulfill the Abrahamic covenant by undoing the exile and all that it means.

Well-known problems abound. Why does the genealogy finish with Joseph if Matthew is going to say that he wasn't Jesus' father after all? This cannot have been a problem for Matthew or he would hardly have followed the genealogy so closely with the story of the virginal conception. It was enough that Jesus was born into the Davidic family; adoption brought legitimation. Further, anyone can say that Matthew made it all up to fulfill Isaiah 7:14 ("the virgin shall conceive"). Since Luke doesn't quote the same passage, though, the argument looks thin. Is Bethlehem mentioned only, perhaps, because of Micah 5:2-4? Again, Luke doesn't quote the same passage, but still gets Mary to Bethlehem for the birth. Some have questioned whether Herod would really have behaved in the way described in Matthew 2; the answer, from any reader of Josephus, would be a firm yes.

One can investigate, as many have, whether there really was a star. One can challenge the flight into Egypt as simply a back-projection from a fanciful reading of Hosea 11:1. These are the natural probing questions of the historian. As with most ancient history, of course, we cannot verify independently that which is reported only in one source. If that gives grounds for ruling it out, however, most of ancient history goes with it. Let us by all means be suspicious, but let us not be paranoid. Just because I've had a nightmare doesn't mean that there aren't burglars in the house. Just because Matthew says that something fulfilled scripture doesn't mean it didn't happen.

What then about his central claim, the virginal conception itself, dropped almost casually into the narrative, with no flourish of trumpets? Some have argued, of course, that there is instead a flourish of strumpets: Matthew has taken care to draw our attention to the peculiarities (to put it no stronger) of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Batlisheba, presumably in order to warn us that something even stranger is coming; or perhaps to enable us, when the news is announced, to connect it with God's strange way of operating in the past. He is hardly likely on this occasion, however, to have made up the story of Mary's being with child by the Holy Spirit in order to "fulfill'" this theme

What about Luke, who tells the story from Mary's point of view? His setting is just as Jewish as Matthew's, with verbal and narratival allusions to and echoes of the Septuagint. Like Matthew, he insists that with this story Israel's history is reaching its God-ordained climax. But his emphasis, unlike Matthew's, is on the very Jewish point that this birth is a direct challenge to the pagan power: in other words, to Caesar. This fits with Luke's whole emphasis: the (very Jewish) gospel is for the whole world, of which Jesus is now the Lord. Israel's god is the king of the world; now, Jesus is the king of the world.

Attention has focused on the census in Luke 2:2-whether it took place and could have involved people traveling to their ancestral homes. But Luke's point has been missed. The census was the time of the great revolt-the rebellion of Judas the Galilean, which Luke not only knows about but allows Gamaliel to compare with Jesus and his movement (Acts 5:37). Luke is deliberately aligning Jesus with the Jewish kingdom-movements, the revolutions which declared that there would be "no king but God."

The census is not, of course, the only query that people have raised about Luke's birth stories. Jesus' birth at Bethlehem seems to have been a puzzle to Luke, which he explains by the census, rather than something he invents for other reasons. The fact that Luke does not mention the wise men, nor Matthew the shepherds, is not a reason for doubting either; this sort of thing crops up in ancient historical sources all the time. Of course, legends surround the birth and childhood of many figures who afterwards become important. As historians we have no reason to say that this did not happen in the case of Jesus, and some reasons to say that it did. But by comparison with other legends about other figures, Matthew and Luke look, after all, quite restrained

Except, of course, in the matter where the real interest centers. Matthew and Luke declare unambiguously that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. What are we to make of this? It will not do to say that we know the laws of nature and that Joseph, Mary, the early church and the evangelists did not. Mary and Joseph hadn't seen diagrams of Fallopian tubes, but that doesn't mean they didn't know where babies came from. Hence Mary's question to Gabriel (in Luke), and Joseph's determination to break the engagement (in Matthew).

Nor can we say that if we believe this story we should believe all the other similar ones in the ancient world as well. Of course, the argument " miracles are possible therefore virginal conception is possible, therefore Jesus' virginal conception may well be true," also commits one to saying, "therefore Augustus's virginal conception may well be true." But that is not my argument.

My argument, rather, works in three stages.

First, the position I have reached about the resurrection and incarnation of Jesus opens the door to reconsidering what we would otherwise probably dismiss. "Miracle," in the sense of divine intervention "from outside," is not in question. What matters is the powerful, mysterious presence of the God of Israel, the creator God, bringing Israel's story to its climax by doing a new thing, bringing the story of creation to its height by a new creation from the womb of the old. Whether or not it happened, this is what it would mean if it did.

Second, there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7:14 this way before Matthew did. Even assuming that Matthew or Luke regularly invented material to fit Jesus into earlier templates, why would they have invented something like this? The only conceivable parallels are pagan ones, and these fiercely Jewish stories have certainly not been modeled on them. Luke at least must have known that telling this story ran the risk of making Jesus out to be a pagan demigod. Why, for the sake of an exalted metaphor, would they take this risk-unless they at least believed the stories to he literally true?

Third, if the evangelists believed them to be true, when and by whom were they invented, if by the time of Matthew and Luke two such different, yet so compatible, stories were in circulation? Did whoever started this hare running mean it in a nonliteral sense, using virginal conception as a metaphor for something else? What was that "something else"? An embroidered border, presumably, around the belief that Jesus was divine. But that belief was a Jewish belief expressed in classic Jewish God-language; while the only models for virginal conception are the nakedly pagan stories of Alexander, Augustus and others. We would have to suppose that, within the first 50 years of Christianity a double move took place: from an early, very Jewish, high Christology, to a sudden paganization, and back to a very Jewish storytelling again. The evangelists would then have thoroughly deconstructed their own deep intentions, suggesting that the climax of YHWH's purpose for Israel took place through a pagan-style miraculous birth.

To put it another way. What would have to have happened, granted the skeptic's position, for the story to have taken the shape it did? To answer this, I must indulge in some speculative tradition-history. Bear with me in a little foolishness. Are they tradition critics? So am I. Are they scholars of ancient history? So am I. Are they reconstructors of early communities? So am I. Are they determined to think the argument through to the end? I speak as a fool-I am more so.

This is how it would look: Christians came to believe that Jesus was in some sense divine. Someone who shared this faith broke thoroughly with Jewish precedents and invented the story of a pagan-style virginal conception. Some Christians failed to realize that this was historicized metaphor, and retold it as though it were historical. Matthew and Luke, assuming historicity; drew independently upon this astonishing fabrication, set it (though in quite different ways) within a thoroughly Jewish context, and wove it in quite different ways into their respective narratives.

And all this happened within, more or less, 50 years. Possible? Yes, of course. Most things are possible in history. Likely? No.

Smoke without fire does, of course, happen quite often in the real world. But this smoke, in that world, without fire? This theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage. Difficult. Unless, of course, you believe in miracles, which most people who disbelieve the virginal conception don't.

Maybe, after all, it is the theory of the contemporary skeptic that is metaphor historicized. The modernist belief that history is a closed continuum of cause and effect is projected onto the screen of the early church, producing a myth (specifically, a tradition-historical reconstruction which sustains and legitimates the original belief so strongly that its proponents come to believe it actually happened.

This foolishness is, of course, a way of saying that no "proof" is possible either way. No one can prove, historically, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove, historically, that she wasn't. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable. If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different. But since they do, and since for quite other reasons I have come to believe that the God of Israel, the world's creator, was personally and fully revealed in and as Jesus of Nazareth, I hold open my historical judgment and say: If that's what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?

On the Third Day: God’s Promise Fulfilled

Among the first meanings that the resurrection opened up to the surprised disciples was that Israel’s hope had been fulfilled. The promised time had come, as Jesus himself had announced during his public career; but it looked very different from what they had imagined. The eschaton had arrived. The long narrative of Israel’s history had reached its climax.

"Resurrection" was a key part of the eschaton. If it had happened to one man whom many had regarded as Israel’s messiah, that meant that it had happened, in principle, to Israel as a whole. The messiah represented Israel, just as David had represented Israel when he faced Goliath. Jesus had been executed as a messianic pretender, as "king of the Jews," and Israel’s God had vindicated him. This, apparently, was how Israel’s God was fulfilling his promises to Israel. Again and again the early Christians emphasized that Jesus was raised from the dead by God, and they meant Israel’s God, YHWH. They saw the resurrection as a life-giving act of the covenant God, the creator who had always had the power to kill and make alive. The resurrection was the sign to the early Christians that this living God had acted at last in accordance with his ancient promise, and had thereby shown himself to be God, the unique creator and sovereign of the world.

The resurrection therefore constituted Jesus as messiah, as "son of God" in the Davidic sense of 2 Samuel 7 or Psalm 2 (texts upon which the early Christians drew to explain and expound their belief). "Davidic" psalms were ransacked for hints about the resurrection of David’s coming son. We can watch this process in Acts, with Luke 24 as its programmatic basis, and we can see exactly the same in Paul. The entire argument of Romans is framed between two great statements of this theme. In between, at one of the letter’s most climactic moments, those who share the "sonship" of the messiah will share as well the "inheritance spoken of in Psalm 2. The resurrection means that Jesus is the messianic "son of God," that Israel’s eschatological hope has been fulfilled; that it is time for the nations of the world to be brought into submission to Israel’s God.

The resurrection, interpreted in this sense, set the early Christians on a course of confrontation, not to say collision, with other Jewish groups of their day. Any claim that Israel’s God had acted here rather than somewhere else within Judaism (the temple, for example), vindicating a man whose work and teaching had been highly controversial, was bound to create a storm. Resurrection always had been a novel, revolutionary doctrine, and this new movement proved their worst fears about it to be true. "They were angry that the disciples were announcing, in Jesus, the resurrection from the dead."

With good reason. The announcement meant the inauguration of the new covenant. Jesus’ followers really did believe that Israel was being renewed through Jesus, and that his resurrection, marking him out as messiah, was a call to Israel to find a new identity in following him and establishing his kingdom. Their belief in the resurrection of the son of God, in this sense, marked out the early Christians from those of their fellow Jews who could not or would not accept such a thing. And it marked them out not as non-Jews or anti-Jews, not as some kind of pagan group, but precisely as people who claimed that the truest and most central hopes and beliefs of Israel had come true, and that they were living by them. To claim the risen Jesus as son of God in the sense of messiah was the most deeply Jewish thing the Christians could do, and hence the most deeply suspect in the eyes of those Jews who did not share their convictions.

The "new covenant" beliefs of the early Christians meant that, in hailing Jesus as son of God, they believed that Israel’s God had acted in him to fulfill the covenant promises by dealing at last with the problem of evil. One standard Jewish analysis of evil did not hold that the created order was itself evil, but that human beings, by committing idolatry, distorted their own humanity into sinful behavior and courted corruption and ultimately death. Death -- the unmaking of the creator’s image-bearing creatures -- was seen not as a good thing, but as an enemy to be defeated. It was the ultimate weapon of destruction: anticreation, antihuman, anti-God. If the creator God was also the covenant God, and if the covenant was there to deal with the unwelcome problem that had invaded the created order at its heart and corrupted human beings themselves, it was this intruder, death itself, that had to be defeated. To allow death to have its way -- to sign up, as it were, to some kind of compromise agreement whereby death took human bodies but the creator was allowed to keep human souls -- was no solution, at least not to the problem as it was perceived within most of Second Temple Judaism. That is why resurrection was never a redescription of death, but always its defeat.

Within the New Testament this perspective is most clearly articulated by Paul, especially in Romans 8 and the Corinthian correspondence, and in Revelation. In the most obvious passage, 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, we find an explicitly messianic theology, rooted in messianically read psalms, in which Jesus, as the son of God, is the agent of the creator God in accomplishing precisely this task of ridding the world of evil and of death. As far as Paul was concerned, this was the defeat of death. The early Christians saw Jesus’ resurrection as the act of the covenant God fulfilling his promises to deal with evil at last. Declaring their faith in his resurrection was a self-involving act in the sense that the world of meaning within which they made sense of Easter was the new world in which sins, their own included, had been forgiven. This did not, of course, reduce the meaning of "Jesus is risen from the dead’ to "My sins have been forgiven." It was not simply a way of saying that Jesus’ crucifixion had been a victory rather than a defeat. The first level of "a son of God" understanding of Jesus’ resurrection can therefore be summarized as follows: Jesus is Israel’s messiah. In him, the creator’s covenant plan to deal with the sin and death that has so radically infected his world has reached its long-awaited and decisive fulfillment.

A second level of understanding the resurrection has to do with claims to leadership. If the phrase "son of God" could mean "messiah" to a first-century Jewish ear, it had a significantly different sense in the world of early Christianity, where it was applied to pagan monarchs and to Caesar in particular. Not that the early Christians chose the phrase "son of God" on the basis of this pagan usage. But there can be no question that many in the Greco-Roman world considered the title a challenge to Caesar. And there is no question that some of the early writers, including Paul, intended it in this way. The long line of Jewish thought that ran from the stories of David and Solomon, through the psalms to books like Isaiah and Daniel, and then into the flourishing literature of the later Second Temple period, saw Israel’s true king as the world’s true lord. The early Christians, precisely because they regarded Jesus as Israel’s messiah, also regarded him as the true monarch of the gentile world.

Calling Jesus "son of God" within this wider circle of meaning constituted a refusal to retreat, a determination to stop Christian discipleship from turning into a private cult, a sect, a mystery religion. It launched a claim on the world -- a claim at once absurd (a tiny group of nobodies thumbing their noses at the might of Rome) and very serious, so serious that within a couple of generations the might of Rome was trying, and failing, to stamp it out. It grew from an essentially positive view of the world. It refused to relinquish the world to the principalities and powers, but claimed even them for the messiah who was now the lord.

To use the phrase "son of God" for Jesus, in a sense which was an implicit confrontation with Caesar, was to affirm the goodness of the created order, now claimed powerfully by the creator God as his own. The resurrection of Jesus supplies the groundwork for this: it is the reaffirmation of the universe of space, time and matter, after not only sin and death but also pagan empire (the institutionalization of sin and death) have done their worst. The early Christians saw Jesus’ resurrection as the action of the creator God to reaffirm the essential goodness of creation and, in an initial and representative act of new creation, to establish a bridgehead within the present world of space, time and matter through which the whole new creation could now come to birth. Calling Jesus ‘son of God" within this context of meaning, they became by implication a collection of rebel cells within Caesar’s empire, loyal to a different monarch. The Sadducees were right to regard the doctrine of resurrection, and especially its announcement in relation to Jesus, as political dynamite.

This is why to imply that Jesus "went to heaven when he died," or that he is now simply a spiritual presence, and to suppose that such ideas exhaust the meaning of "Jesus was raised from the dead," is to miss the point, to cut the nerve of the social, cultural and political critique. Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it over-throws it. The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter. That is why resurrection has always had an inescapable political meaning; that is why the Sadducees in the first century, and the Enlightenment in our own day, have opposed it so strongly. No tyrant is threatened by Jesus going to heaven, leaving his body in a tomb. No governments face the authentic Christian challenge when the church’s social preaching tries to base itself on Jesus teaching detached from the central and energizing fact of his resurrection (or when, for that matter, the resurrection is affirmed simply as an example of a supernatural "happy ending" which guarantees postmortem bliss).

The third and final meaning of the resurrection of Jesus has to do with the meaning of the word "God" itself. This was, after all, the greatest of the questions that the early Christians posed not only to their pagan neighbors, but also within the Jewish circles where they began. If there is one true God, as the Jews had always claimed, and if he really is the creator of the world and the covenant God of Israel, then what must now be said of him on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus? How does calling Jesus son of God, in this sense, help us to understand not only who Jesus was and is but who the one true God was and is?

The early Christians usually referred to the resurrection of Jesus as the work of this God. "He has been raised," they said; "God raised Jesus from the dead." The work of this God was part of the interpretation, the grid of meaning through which they viewed this event. And from very early on (it is already taken for granted by Paul), the fact that this Jesus had been raised by this God, when mulled over and reflected on in the light of all that Jesus had done and said, and all that Israel’s scriptures had said about the redeeming and reconciling action of this God, drew from the early Christians the breathtaking belief that Jesus was son of God, the unique Son of this God as opposed to any other. They meant not simply that he was Israel’s messiah, though that remained foundational; nor simply that he was the reality of which Caesar and all other such tyrants were the parodies, though that remained a vital implication. They meant it in the sense that he was the personal embodiment and revelation of the one true God.

Paul’s letters indicate that from very early on in the Christian movement this God and this Jesus were being referred to as father and son within contexts that clearly put them together on the divine side of the equation. The truly remarkable thing about this is that the arguments that were being mounted at the time, and even the Old Testament scriptures that were being quoted and expounded, are all of a strongly monotheistic tone. In key Pauline texts, Paul speaks of Jesus as son in relation to God; in others, of God as father in relation to Jesus. There are, of course, various arguments where he puts the two together, and not surprisingly the resurrection is never far away when he does so:

For if, being enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, how much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life . . . (Rom:5:10).

For as many as are led by God’s Spirit are the children of God. You did not receive a spirit of slavery to go back to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship, in which we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit’s own self bears witness with our spirit that we are God’s children, and, if children, then heirs: heirs of God, and joint heirs with the Messiah, if we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. . . (Rom. 8:14-17).

For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters . . . (Rom. 8:29).

These passages make sense only if Paul, by referring to Jesus as the son if God, means that Jesus is the one sent by God, from God, not only as a messenger but as the embodiment of his love. To send someone else is hardly an ultimate proof of self-giving love. The same is true in Galatians:

I am crucified with the Messiah; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but the Messiah lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal: 2:19f.).

As long as the heir is a child … he is under guardians and trustees until the time set by the father’s will . . . So when the time was fully come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who are under the law, so that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, father. So you are no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, then an heir, through God (Gal. 4:1f. 4-7).

And it is in the light of these rich, multilayered statements that we discover another layer of meaning in the great opening statement of Romans:

. . . God’s gospel concerning his son, who was descended from David’s seed according to the flesh, and marked out as son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead, Jesus the Messiah, Lord . . . (Rom. 1:1, 3f.).

The resurrection, in other words, declares that Jesus really is God’s Son -- not only in the sense that he is the messiah, though Paul certainly intends that here, and not only in the sense that he is the world’s true lord, though Paul intends that too, but also in the sense that he is the one in whom the living God, Israel’s God, has become personally present in the world, has become one of the human creatures that were made from the beginning in the image of this same God.

The picture of the true God that emerges from all this is totally different from the caricatured "all-powerful miracle-worker," the "interventionist" God who has become such an easy target in some recent polemical writing. Theologians today are understandably eager to shed any suggestion of a pompous, omnipotent bully, a triumphalist "God" in that sense. But it would be a bad mistake to suppose that this is the picture of God offered in the New Testament, or that the resurrection of Jesus lends it any support.

Of course, there is triumph in the message; where would the power and appeal of the gospel be without Romans 8:31-9 or 1 Corinthians 15:54-7? But we should think again before we accuse the early Christians of "triumphalism." Such charges have a habit of rebounding -- not least on those who insist on promoting the unstable worldview of late-modern or postmodern Western culture to a position of preeminence, and then try to climb on top of it, claiming it as high moral ground, and looking down on all who went before them.

It is precisely the Christian understanding of Israel’s God that prevents a move toward the God of Deism on the one hand, and the God of pantheism on the other, together with their respective half-cousins, the interventionist God of dualist supernaturalism, and the panentheist deity of much contemporary speculation. Conversely, where we find resistance to the vision of God offered by the New Testament (a vision which grows precisely from the Easter faith of the early disciples), there is good reason to suppose that the underlying cause of such resistance, in the contemporary world as in the ancient, is to be found (to quote T. F. Torrance) in "the sheer horror that [some] people . . . have for the being and action of God himself in space and time."

When the early Christians developed their understanding of Israel’s God, they did not abandon their Jewish roots and adopt the language and thought-forms of paganism. They developed their theology by embracing one of the central Jewish beliefs of their day, the resurrection of the dead (which had been the solace of many a righteous Jew when faced with pagan oppression and injustice), and by understanding it all the more deeply in the light of what they believed had happened to Jesus. This was what made them a messianic group within Judaism. This was what made them take on Caesar’s world with the news that there was "another king." This was what made them not only speak of the one true God, but invoke him, pray to him, love him and serve him in terms of the Father and the lord, of the God who sent the Son and now sends the Spirit of the Son, in terms of the only-begotten God who makes visible the otherwise invisible creator of the world. This is why, when they spoke of the resurrection of Jesus, they spoke of the resurrection of the Son of God.